AvePoint Inc

NASDAQ:AVPT

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q2

[Operator]

Good afternoon, and welcome to the AvePoint, Inc. Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded.

I'd now like to turn the conference over to Marc Griffin. Please go ahead.

[Marc Griffin, IR]

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to AvePoint's second quarter 2022 Earnings Call.

Today, we'll be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market closed. With me on the call this afternoon is the Chief Executive Officer, Dr. TJ Jiang; and Jim Caci, Chief Financial Officer. TJ will begin with a brief review of the business results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022. Jim will then review the financial results for the second quarter, followed by the company's outlook for the third quarter and full year of 2022. We will then open up the call for questions.

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 that this presentation describes certain non-GAAP measures, including non-GAAP operating income and non-GAAP operating margin, which are not measures prepared in accordance with the 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 the company's management evaluates the company's operating performance. These non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation from and as substitutes for or superior to the financial measures prepared in accordance with the U.S. GAAP. For listeners, who do not have a copy of the quarter ended June 30 press release, you may obtain one by visiting the Investor Relations section of the company's website.

With that, let me turn the call over to TJ.

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Thank you, Marc, and thank you to everyone joining us on the call today.

In our last call, I closed by reinforcing how important it is to grow, while being prudent with expenditures in the highly dynamic market we're entering. Today, amidst the challenging and uncertain macroeconomic environment, I'm pleased to share AvePoint continue to show its proven ability to do just that.

Our total revenue for the quarter was $55.7 million at the upper end of our guidance and would have exceeded our guidance range, if not for the strong FX headwind we faced in the quarter. This was driven by strong SaaS revenue of $27.6 million, up 34% from the same period 2021. We grew total ARR 28% year-over-year to $178.2 million.

Technology plays an important role for organizations across every sector. Every customer I speak with believes there is a real opportunity to overcome today's challenges with technology that secures digital collaboration data, sustains connection between people and ensures business resiliency.

We transform data and collaboration, so users can be more productive with the latest cloud services and drive efficiency in delivery and management of those services for infrastructure and operations leaders. We do this through the AvePoint confidence platform, which helps organizations using cloud services, including Microsoft 365, Google, Salesforce and more than a half dozen additional cloud collaboration platforms move faster, become more agile, reduce costs and improve productivity.

With Gartner predicting spending on public cloud services to grow more than 20% in 2022, the AvePoint confidence platform and our purpose-built industry solutions are well positioned to enable organizations to collaborate with confidence in the modern workplace.

Organizations in every industry continue to choose our resilience suite to ensure business continuity and compliance with data retention and other regulatory guidelines. With AvePoint, a global leader in recruiting services can confidently accelerate adoption of its sales force environment by complying with GDPR and reducing the threat of downtime, which can cause the organization of €5 million per day.

Federal agencies like National Endowment for the Humanities have strict retention policies to address regulations such as the freedom of the Information Act. They can quickly and confidently recover years-old Microsoft 365 files necessary to its work with AvePoint. We continue our work with Asian Development Bank to protect its 15 terabytes of data to mitigate risks from ransomware attacks, ensure business continuity, maintain the public's trust and protect its reputation.

Our Fidelity suite preserves data integrity as organizations transform from one system to the next, capturing data for compliance or integrating SaaS applications to streamline the way users work. With AvePoint, the IRS migrated multiple workloads from legacy systems to Microsoft 365 to modernize its collaboration environment. AvePoint also worked with one of the world's most recognizable food producers with more than 20 production facilities across the U.S., Canada and Bahamas to migrate Microsoft 365 following the acquisition that adhere to all GDPR regulations and privacy laws, all while ensuring business continuity during the transformation.

Our control suite provides differentiated value to infrastructure and operations leaders delivering central services at scale. As a result, organizations can better maximize the digital transformation investments with greater control over their budgets, licenses, users and workspaces.

We are accelerating adoption of a digital workplace program by automating service delivery for a Fortune 250 company, specializing in engineering solutions with more than 336 manufacturing locations in 50 countries. We're also helping a large multinational manufacturing company based in Germany manages its growing SaaS operations and increase Microsoft 365 adoption for its 6,500 employee workforce spread across 40 sites.

During the quarter, we reinforced our commitment to help businesses continue to mitigate risks, protect business-critical applications and drive productivity with added support for protecting Microsoft Azure workloads, which capture more than 20% of all public cloud spend. We also added four of our existing solutions on Microsoft AppSource, an online cloud marketplace, providing tailored line of business solutions. This creates a more seamless experience for businesses, shortens their purchasing cycle and helps them combat evolving workplace trends and challenges quicker.

We also continue to garner industry recognition for our innovation. This quarter, we were named a leader being online backup software by G2 and a representative vendor in the 2022 Gartner Market Guide for backup as a service. Our work, powering business transformation, led to our recognition as a finalist for the 2022 Microsoft Partner of the Year awards in the education and government categories, chosen from more than 3,900 nominations across 100 countries. Our purpose-built platform powering inspiring and transformative learning experiences won the 2022 AdTech Breakthrough award, one of the world's most prestigious award programs, recognizing outstanding educational products.

At the end of June, we completed our acquisition of United Kingdom-based Combined Knowledge, a leader in the development and delivery of collaboration, education and support. We're confident this move will enable us not only to bring a robust end-to-end experience to our customers to accelerate the adoption of their investments in digital transformation, but also advance our SaaS, modern learning product lines, domain expertise around corporate learning and higher education.

We continue to see a powerful snowball effect from our growing channel business, launched just over one year ago, which provides small and midsized businesses with the same enterprise-grade technology available to Fortune 500 businesses.

Our channel ecosystem expansion is continued in line with our geographic and market segment expansion. Our MSP business, primarily focused on the SMB market, continues its robust year-over-year triple-digit sales growth amidst the environment of tremendous consolidation. We're finding that as larger MSPs already invested with AvePoint acquires smaller MSPs, we continue to be chosen as a part of choice for scale, efficiency and security.

We continue to meet the needs of our evolving channel ecosystem with the AvePoint certification program as of end of the quarter has resulted in 1,100 certifications and more than 3,000 hours of training completed. This means more partner engineers, presales teams and product specialists have been trained in our industry-leading technology to best use it to design custom solutions that enable them to source more business and exceed competitors.

We also saw success with our existing customer base as they continue their cloud transformation and look to gain more value from their own cloud investments. We worked with a 10-year customer of ours, a Fortune 100 financial service organization known for serving the unique needs of nonprofits, institutions and educators across the United States to create a secure collaboration service in its new Microsoft 365 deployment. The number of our customers with over $100,000 in ARR increased to 383 in Q2, up 34% year-over-year.

Before Jim goes over the numbers, I want to touch on the share repurchase activity. Through June 30, 2022, we have repurchased approximately $10 million in shares since announcing our share repurchase plan. In summary, we continue to execute on our mission to enable organizations to collaborate with confidence in the modern workplace amidst uncertain macroeconomic times.

With that, I'll turn it over to Jim to discuss our financial results in more detail.

[Jim Caci, CFO]

Thank you, TJ, and good afternoon, everyone.

As I review our second quarter results today, please note that I'll be referring to non-GAAP metrics, unless otherwise noted. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financials is included in today's earnings release, which is available on our website.

Total revenues for the second quarter ended June 30, 2022, were $55.7 million, up 23% year-over-year and up 31% in constant currency. Within total revenue, SaaS revenue came in at $27.6 million, up 34% year-over-year and up 43% in constant currency. SaaS revenue constituted 50% of total revenue compared to 45% of total revenue last year. Term license revenue came in at $14 million, up 26% year-over-year or 33% in constant currency and constituted 25% of total revenue compared to 24% of total revenue last year.

As a reminder, more than 50% of our revenue comes from international operations, which do business in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, predominantly Japanese yen, euro and the British pound.

During the quarter, we experienced a strong foreign exchange headwind due to the strength of the dollar, which affected revenue by approximately 3%. This headwind is primarily against our revenue and ARR metrics and not our profitability metrics due to the global nature of our operations.

As of the quarter end, we had total ARR of $178.2 million, representing growth of 28% from a year ago and 29% adjusting for FX impacts. Our core ARR ended the quarter at $166.6 million, up 26% year-over-year. As customers continue their cloud transformation and expand their SaaS operations, our average core ARR per account continues to grow as well.

At quarter end, the average core ARR per account was approximately $39,500, which represented an increase of 10% year-over-year. This growth was driven by 383 customers with ARR of over $100,000, up 34% from the prior-year period. Our core ARR dollar-based net retention rate for the quarter was 106% or 107% adjusted for FX impacts.

Now let's review the income statement in more detail. Gross profit in the quarter was $41 million, representing a gross margin of 73.6% compared to 74.8% in the year-ago period. The slight margin decline is the result of our business mix and the impact of FX.

Going forward, we are continuing to drive our sales efforts towards our fastest-growing revenue stream, our SaaS solutions. At the same time, we expect service revenue as a percentage of overall revenue to decline by transitioning more of these services to our channel partners, resulting in overall margin improvement.

Sales and marketing expenses were $23.8 million or 43% of revenue compared to 42% of revenue a year ago. This represents an increase of $4.6 million year-over-year. This was driven by an increase in headcount and personnel-related expenses as we expanded our sales and customer success organizations as well as additional marketing spend as we invested in both our media and event strategies.

We have grown our sales and marketing headcount by 8% year-over-year. The increase in headcount has resulted in a $2.2 million increase in total compensation, primarily driven by salary and benefits. Programmatic spend in marketing is up $1.8 million year-over-year, primarily driven by brand awareness efforts and marketing events.

R&D expense was $6.9 million or 12% of revenue compared to 8% or $3.8 million in a year-ago period, a year-over-year increase of $3.1 million or 81%. Our headcount was up 54% compared to last year as we continue to invest in the development of innovative technologies that help our customers stay competitive amidst evolving workplace trends and digital transformation.

G&A expense was $11 million or 20% of revenue compared to 16% or $7.3 million in the year-ago period. This represents an increase of $3.7 million year-over-year. The increase in G&A expense largely reflects an increase in people and infrastructure-related expenses associated with being a public company in the current year versus being a private company a year ago, including an approximate 18% increase in our headcount. Non-GAAP operating loss was $1.3 million compared to an operating income of $3.3 million in the year-ago period.

Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the quarter with $246.6 million in cash and short-term investments. Cash used in operations was approximately $475,000 in the quarter, while free cash flow, which includes CapEx was a negative $1.7 million. Our use of cash in the quarter was in line with our expectations. In Q2, we continued to purchase shares under our stock buyback program. And through June 30, 2022, we have repurchased approximately 1.9 million shares at an aggregate purchase price of approximately $10 million.

I would now like to turn to our outlook for the third quarter and the full year 2022. We are confident in the long-term durability and predictability of our growth. At the same time, we want to be cautious given the recent macro headwinds we saw in the last couple of weeks of the quarter.

Our revised guidance assumes these trends will continue for the remainder of the year. Since March 31, 2022, we have seen an incremental strengthening of the U.S. dollar, resulting in foreign exchange headwind in fiscal '22. We now expect the total FX impact to be approximately $4.8 million on our ARR and approximately $5 million on our revenue.

For the third quarter, total revenue is expected to be in the range of $62 million to $64 million or approximately 17% year-over-year growth, 23% adjusted for constant currency. Non-GAAP operating income is expected to be in the range of $1 million to $2 million. And for the full year 2022, total revenue is expected to be in the range of $230 million to $234 million or approximately 21% year-over-year growth, 26% adjusted for constant currency.

Non-GAAP operating income is expected to be in the range of a loss of $3.5 million to income of $1 million. ARR is expected to be in the range of $202 million to $206 million or approximately 28% year-over-year growth, 31% adjusted for FX impact.

In summary, I am proud of our team for another strong quarter. We continue to see strong demand for our solutions as we remain focused on delivering value to organizations who continue to put their trust in us.

With that, we'll open up the call for questions. Operator?

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Brian Essex with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

[Brian Essex, Goldman Sachs]

Hi, good afternoon. And thank you for taking the question. TJ, Jim, congrats on the results. Nice consistent performance on the backdrop of a lot of macro uncertainty. And I guess on that point, could you - sure. And I guess on that point, could you help us understand what you're seeing from a macro perspective? I understand the FX, but what we've heard across the software landscape with regard to longer sales cycles, more scrutiny of enterprise budgets, more layers of approval needed to get deals done? And then to the extent that you might bill in U.S. currency or U.S. dollars, perhaps products becoming more expensive for some of the customers outside the U.S. Maybe if you could frame some of those points out that would be super helpful.

[Jim Caci, CFO]

Sure. And Brian, let me address it first, and then TJ can add some commentary on top as well. So I think partly what you just said, obviously, we're seeing some or most of all of that in various different pieces. The first, obviously, is FX. We called that out in the remarks just prior to the question.

So we definitely see that as a headwind, and we're going to see that continuing for the second half of the year. So for sure, that's definitely an impact. We did see at the end of the second quarter some elongation of some sales cycles.

So we would expect to see that to continue into the second half of the year as well. And I think we're trying to be prudent and conscientious of that. And really, when you think about it, that's what we've built into thinking about the second half of the year.

Those were two key factors in our thinking. FX obviously, the headwind on the more global macroeconomic environment that we're in right now, geopolitical influences, trying to be conservative to a certain degree, but also taking that into account and reflecting that in what we expect to deliver and then what obviously we're sharing in terms of guidance.

And then maybe the third thing that is also influencing our kind of thinking internally, and those first two are definitely much more macro driven. And the third one is maybe a little bit more internally focused, where we're seeing a lot more of our customers and the mix in terms of product mix. We actually sold more migration product in the first half than we were anticipating, which has an impact for us, and I think you and I have talked about this, we don't include migration in our ARR.

So that product since the mix shifted, and we actually sold more which was great, our customers were demanding it, and we were there to satisfy it, but it obviously has an impact on ARR. And we saw that in really Q1 and Q2, and we're expecting to see that continue for the second half of the year. So we've also brought that into our thinking and kind of adjusted our guidance even on ARR to include both the first two macro conditions and then also the third, which is a little bit more specific to us. So we've kind of factored all of those things into our thinking.

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Yes, thanks for the question. I just want to comment on, overall, the macro conditions that Jim outlined are things that we cannot control, but things that we can control. So I just came back from Tori in EMEA, our Munich office to meet with our EMEA management team as well as Japan, first time since COVID pandemic.

The overall tenure of our sales leaders and our partners are one of bullishness and optimism. So there's still tremendous demand. There's a shift to cloud and the need for AvePoint's ability to help our customers to scale and deploy across hybrid complex scenarios, especially also in Japan, where they are a couple of years behind the Europeans in terms of going to cloud.

So a lot of the partners are looking to us to help them accelerate that digital transformation. So macro side, we think that by continuing to invest in the channel allow us to scale and mitigate some of these macro conditions. But overall, the Microsoft cloud market is vast and the opportunity in front of us remain very, very large.

[Brian Essex, Goldman Sachs]

Right. No, super helpful. Thank you, TJ. And maybe if I could have you maybe follow up on that. How are CIOs thinking from a budget scrutiny perspective? I mean a lot of enterprises are under pressure to operate more efficiently and cut costs. What is kind of the ROI framework that they're looking at when you're looking at your migration platform? Is that accelerating adoption? I mean I certainly think that particularly as they migrate to kind of a more SaaS-centric platform that's going to enable easier deployment and consumption of the platform. But what is that initial hurdle that they have to get over in terms of is ROI a compelling driver? Or is this something that they are just already committed to, and that's what's driving the momentum?

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

There's definitely ROI drivers. There is momentum to consolidate environments CIOs need to support both on-prem and in cloud. This plays well into our wheelhouse of being a platform provider. Not only do we make it very cost effective and efficient for them to migrate from legacy as well as different cloud platforms into Microsoft cloud.

But of course, once they're with our new Entrust product line, which is one of our fastest growing product line. They allow them to do license and entitlement, management and delegated administration, which effectively lower the cost of running in cloud.

So ROI and platform consolidation definitely plays a part. Of course there has also been consolidation in our ecosystem as everyone know in, especially in the MSP space there, the partners are also looking for consistent track record and steady platforms to invest and be strategic with and they're also AvePoint it's shinning through.

[Brian Essex, Goldman Sachs]

Got it, very helpful, thank you so much.

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Thanks, Brian.

[Operator]

The next question is from Jason Ader with William Blair. Please go ahead.

[Jason Ader, William Blair]

Yes, thank you. Good afternoon, guys. I wanted to ask first about the macro commentary from Microsoft about softness in the SMB space. You talked about the elongation of sale cycles, I'm assuming you're talking about enterprise, but are you also seeing some slowdown in the SMB. And then just a clarification, you talked about the last couple of weeks of July. I'm assuming it's also continued through the first six weeks of this quarter, is that fair to say?

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

I'll make the first comment. Yes, elongation deal cycle, are more on the enterprise side, and increasingly our mid-market SMB side is the fast growing and bigger percentage of our business. So, we don't see that on the SMB side. In fact, we actually see because of the consolidation in the market and - on the SMB side, we're actually picking up again three-digit continue that fast pace seek growth. We are offering some campaigns and incentives for partners to switch over to us even faster in SMB side. So, we don't see - any slowdown in the SMB side for us again, it's a big market. So, we have a small sliver it's for us to grab market share and I'll leave it to Jim to answer the other part.

[Jim Caci, CFO]

Yes, so and then on the, I think the other piece was the elongation in terms of continuation for the last two weeks. Yes, we saw at the end of the quarter. Yes, we're baking that in. We're still seeing some of that and we're planning, we're assuming, Jason, that that continues for the second half of the year and again, trying to be conservative. That's what we're seeing now. It may turn it may change, but we're planning as if it's going to continue and we've kind of bake that into the guidance.

[Jason Ader, William Blair]

Good, thank you. And then TJ, how do you interpret the increased momentum in migration products, is it just the linearity impact of COVID kind of accelerating the shift to cloud, or is there something else going on there?

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Yes, it's really interesting we get increased demands in migration especially in EMEA. There is quite, a bit of momentum there across hybrid deployments lot of big migration deals across our enterprise customers. It's continued to pick up pace in consolidation platforms. We think part of that is ROI driven. So it's yes, it's a very interesting phenomenon.

[Jim Caci, CFO]

Yes and unusually, Jason, we see more of it focused on new customers coming in where they're coming in as - the tip of the spear being migration in a lot of cases. But in the first two quarters of this year and particularly second quarter, we saw more of our existing customers using our migration products right and engaging us there, which is a little different than in the past. And I think it goes to what some of what TJ was saying again, trying to de-risk a little bit and be more focused and have a hybrid solution on their end migration, is a key element to be able to do that.

[Jason Ader, William Blair]

So you just - you interpreted as just acceleration to cloud?

[Jim Caci, CFO]

Yes exactly...

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Yes.

[Jason Ader, William Blair]

So, the customers, existing customers that maybe in the cloud, a little bit already, but now they're just kind of saying you know what we got to just get there faster?

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Yes and consolidation as well, so absolutely.

[Jason Ader, William Blair]

Got you, okay. And then last one for me, just for you, TJ, which specific SKUs are you seeing the most momentum. I know you've talked about that in the past and above kind of - kind of a real-time view on what is doing really well in your product set?

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Yes, as I mentioned this whole in Entrust product portfolio, which is part of our control suite continue to gain real good momentum. It's along the line of SaaS management. We're increasingly invest into that area to essentially help customers once they are in cloud to better control costs and better control access patterns and delegation and also multi-tenant management.

So as customers get into cloud and realize the nuances of data sprawl that becomes a very important topic. So, we continue to see control suite to be a fast growing SKU. Of course, having said that, our resiliency suite as we mentioned before in the last couple of quarters is 50% of our business, which is led by a backup as a service, especially with the ransomware detection and recovery capabilities, so that continues to be a big piece of our revenue.

[Jason Ader, William Blair]

Very good, thanks guys, good luck.

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Thank you, Jason.

[Jim Caci, CFO]

Thanks, Jason.

[Operator]

The next question is from Derrick Wood with Cowen and Company. Please go ahead.

[Derrick Wood, Cowen and Company]

Great and thanks, congrats on a solid quarter. I wanted to ask about the progression of the new hunter-farmer model and just trying to think of potential headwinds or tailwinds. So I guess one, how is sales retention been trending through these changes. And then two, assuming most account changes have been made. How are you feeling about setting up for, kind of stronger upsell cross sell-in in the second half?

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Okay yes, so great question. The hunter-farmer specialization model as we mentioned earlier the accounts are all allocated. It does take time for the new account owners of existing patched to introduce themselves to the customers and establish relationship to do the upsell and cross-sell. So you're absolutely right. It does take time to do that and we expect that will uplift the upsell and cross-sell dollar values in the second half of the year.

Of course Jim also talk about the occurrence of migration projects that were part of the upsell into existing accounts. We see a lot more migration in existing customers. So that's part of the equation, even though that doesn't necessarily contribute to our AR number today. So yes so, in terms of churn though, that's a very good question. We like all tech companies are experiencing higher than historical churn.

Historically, we're actually much better than our industry peers in terms of controlling high retention, but Q1 and Q2 this year. We do see higher than usual churn for us even though compared to our industry peers we're still below those churn rates. Having said that though, we've now in Q3 starting to see that come down, because the market is cooling and we do see some tech companies announcing either hiring freezes or shedding of workforces. So, we see that churn pressure its going down, second half of the year.

[Derrick Wood, Cowen and Company]

Okay. TJ thanks helpful color. Jim one for you, if I look at your guidance for Q3 and the full year, we obviously come back in Q4 and it attenuates kind of flat revenue quarter-on-quarter. I know you saw a similar dynamic last year. But historically, I did think that was one time last year historically you did have decent sequential strength in Q4?

Can you just talk about the dynamics on that revenue progression and then just the guidance would accentuate that you're kind of exiting Q4 with about mid-upper teens revenue growth, but you're guiding to yeah, 31% AR growth at year-end. So it's a pretty big delta, could you talk about why that's such a big delta and how we should think about that potentially converging in 2023?

[Jim Caci, CFO]

Yes, so maybe the - first piece of that first, in terms of thinking about Q3 and Q4. So I think, again this is where we're really trying to be conscientious and you're right that historically we would think about Q3, being a strong quarter because of our public sector and that being a driver, a key driver in Q3 and then Q4 historically being software industry. Q4 being stronger and what we're trying to do there is really just be conscientious and be somewhat cautious in terms of the, looking of the bigger macro environment as to what's happening.

And so just trying to be a little bit conservative there and not get out over our SKUs too far. So, again, that's really the pullback there is just trying to, to address it in that way so again, nothing more than that then really no major shift. We would still be - thinking about it the same way in a longer-term environment that our Q3 would be strong and our Q4 would ultimately be stronger. But in this year based on what we're seeing in the market right now, we're just trying to be conservative.

And then in terms of ARR, so we definitely have this mix in terms ARR and revenue. And so again, we're just seeing that as we lay out the forecast for the rest of the year, we do have a little bit of that mix that will show us roughly getting to 31%, about 28% without FX impact and then about 31%, assuming the FX impact.

So that's really just the forecast of where we are and what we see in those dynamics. We're being as conservative as we can on the revenue side and think we're still being conservative on the ARR side, but we're going to get to that 31%. And as I mentioned, I think there's three impacts on ARR. We've got the FX impacts. We have the macroeconomic environment that we're trying to shift a little bit downward.

And then the third component is the migration component to our business that we don't include in ARR. So those three components are impacting. But again, I think we feel pretty strong about getting to the 28% pre-FX and then taking into account FX getting to that 31%.

[Derrick Wood, Cowen and Company]

Okay, all right, thank you.

[Jim Caci, CFO]

Thanks, Derrick.

[Operator]

The next question is from Kirk Materne with Evercore. Please go ahead.

[Kirk Materne, Evercore]

Yes. Thanks very much. Two questions for me. I guess, TJ, just to start, can you just talk a little bit more about some of those enterprise deals that are seeing elongated sales cycles? Is it price sensitivity from the buyer? Is it additional approval from hire up? Are there - I guess, are there things you all can do from a sales perspective to help make sure those type of deals don't get pushed out too long or don't get pushed aside for, say, three, six months? And I guess if you saw some of that elongation have the ones that maybe you saw would close in June started to close in July. I'm just trying to get a sense on what are maybe the driving factors there and if any of those have started to settle out a little bit?

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Right. Great question. Overall, we're actually pretty happy with the momentum of our enterprise continued business. The elongation in some of the accounts are due to the additional approval process. What we think actually continue to help us is our additional focus around security. So actually, recently, we just obtained another level of security certification. So those type of cloud ops and cloud security validation really helps move along this approval process in large enterprises, along with obviously data sovereignty and multiple instances around the world. So yes, we're working to streamline some of the process on our side, including clickers agreements.

And also another new avenue we find to be able to accelerate approval process is leveraging channel. So we have a leverage channel for medium to small businesses, but now we're looking at also leveraging channel for large enterprise customers. What happened is when those large enterprise customers typically have a procurement through partner, those agreement and key to this has already prenegotiated. So it actually abstract out kind of the negotiation on our side. We're going to try that as well as a way to accelerate deal cycles. We think that's a really potential good way to leverage channel.

[Kirk Materne, Evercore]

That's helpful. And Jim, can you just remind, I guess, us, when you have deals that come up for renewal from a SaaS perspective, is there [indiscernible] product that you're going to use? Or I guess, if you have those levers are you pulling right now? Are you trying to lay them alone? I guess can you just give us a sense of kind of how you guys think about pricing right now from a product perspective?

[Jim Caci, CFO]

Sure. Good question, Kirk. You were breaking up on our end a little bit there, but I think I got the gist of your question around contracts up for renewal, pricing and. So I will tell you, there's a couple of things we're doing there. So one is in most of our new contracts and even going back into last year, we are building in price escalations into the contracts so that when they are up for renewal, there's effectively a feature already built in for an escalation. So that's number one.

And then when we think about pricing, so there are certain areas in our product suites, where we can improve pricing, where it's not as competitive. And then there are other areas where it is competitive. So we look at the pricing really on a product by product basis, not just across the board and, hey, can we raise prices or not? It's literally at a product by product basis. And then in each individual account, we're looking at them as they're up for renewal, what's the value proposition, the engagement, all of those things to consider where we can improve our pricing and margin, we're looking to do that. But again, the biggest key for us is building it into the contracts upfront. That was something we started more and more last year and it continues now. Again, having that built in gives us the best chance when it's up for renewal.

[Kirk Materne, Evercore]

That's helpful. And actually, if I could that's your answer to Derrick's question on sort of the 3Q, 4Q. Are you seeing anything different right now in terms of your government customers maybe in the way they think about SaaS products versus, say, term deals or the way they want to be sold? Do you see any change in that this year? Or would obviously have an impact on rev rec. So I was just kind of curious how you guys are thinking about that?

[Jim Caci, CFO]

Yes. Thanks, Kirk. So right now, no. I mean I think overall, I would say that - so we're not seeing any changes there. That's a group that historically has done some hybrid as well and not a complete migration over to SaaS. So when I think of our percentage, when you look at our Q2 revenue allocation kind of splits between SaaS and term, which would be our hybrid piece, I think you're going to see similar trends in Q3 and Q4. So I wouldn't expect any significant change there. I would expect it to be similar to Q2.

[Kirk Materne, Evercore]

Thank you.

[Operator]

The next question is from Nehal Chokshi with Maxim Group. Please go ahead.

[Nehal Chokshi, Northland Capital Markets]

Yes. Thanks. That's actually Northland Capital Markets. That's all right. So year-over-year growth for incremental ARR has been flat for 1H '22. And your updated guidance implies that, that incremental ARR accelerates to about 30% in 2H '22. So have you seen evidence yet that, that acceleration in incremental ARR is starting to play through?

[Jim Caci, CFO]

Yes. We are seeing it already. So kind of alluding to some of the slowdown we saw at the end of Q2, but we are seeing in terms of the pipeline build and all of those kind of let's call the leading indicators that we would see going into Q3 and Q4 are really strong. And so give us that confidence that those numbers that you just alluded to for Q3 and Q4 are very attainable.

[Nehal Chokshi, Northland Capital Markets]

Got it. Great. And then on a year-over-year basis, your sales and marketing was up quite a bit year-over-year. But on a Q-o-Q basis, it was down. What's going on there in terms of the Q2 trajectory on sales and marketing?

[Jim Caci, CFO]

So there's two elements, right? One is there's an FX component to it that we, on the expense side, right, actually benefit from. So that's one component. And then the second component, just the way some of the timing of our expenses work. So you're going to see a bigger tick up in for some of those expenses, some of our marketing expenses kind of just have a - obviously, have a timing issue to them in terms of when they're actually incurred. And then we also, obviously, as TJ alluded to, had higher-than-expected turnover in some areas of the business, including sales, and that's been now rectified, but we saw some of that impact in Q2 as well. So part of it is timing, part of it is FX. And again, you're going to see - obviously, you'll see improvements there in Q3. You're going to see continued investments, including more marketing spend. But again, that was just related to timing.

[Nehal Chokshi, Northland Capital Markets]

Okay. Great. And I presume that you do not have any FX hedging programs in place, correct?

[Jim Caci, CFO]

We currently, no. We don't have any hedging programs that we're working on. And if you think about it, we have a little bit of a natural hedge built in between our revenue and expenses, as you've seen even in Q2.

[Nehal Chokshi, Northland Capital Markets]

Great. Okay, thank you.

[Operator]

The next question is from Brett Knoblauch with Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.

[Brett Knoblauch, Cantor Fitzgerald]

Hi, Tianyi Jiang, how are you doing? Just a couple of questions for me. First, headcount has been pretty big increases kind of across all segments on a year-over-year basis. How do you think you're positioned now? Do you expect that pace of headcount growth to remain robust? Or do you expect that to kind of level off?

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Yes. So a lot of the headcount growth is our investment into lower-cost regions. So we, for example, expanded our Vietnam office in terms of R&D headcount as well as our Philippines office in terms of operation support. So a lot of the headcount come from there. We are looking at creating redundancy and doing some derisking in the current macro climate here.

So that would - we think it's a short-term situation as we drive towards efficiency over the longer term to potentially consolidate some of the function roles. But yes, so - but at the same time, the business is growing at a nice clip. The market in front of us is massive. So we're not looking at slowing down our business growth.

[Jim Caci, CFO]

Yes. I think maybe just one additional comment on that. So I think - if you think of the Q3 and Q4 guidance that we just put out, we have - we obviously kind of brought down revenue to - based on the thinking that we've kind of already illustrated, but we're keeping our operating income guidance the same. And so what we're thinking there is that we're actually going to manage those expenses.

So to answer your question about like the growth, it obviously will decline as a percentage because, again, we're going to manage to those original kind of targets for non-GAAP operating income. And I think it's important here that we recognize that in this economic environment right now, where we're being conservative and understanding what the revenue could be, we also want to take the same approach on our expenses and be much more conscious in terms of how we're investing and understanding that if we're being conservative on the revenue and understanding that there's impacts there, we also need to be prudent on the expenses. And so again, so we're doing that, and you'll see that reflected in Q3 and Q4.

[Brett Knoblauch, Cantor Fitzgerald]

Understood. And then on the rebrand of EduTech to MaivenPoint, can you remind us how big of a business that is and maybe where that ranks as a priority or maybe a growth driver over the medium term?

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Yes. We always said the vertical solutions is one of our growth drivers. We currently don't disclose those specific business verticals, but it's a business that's growing really nicely for us. We're actually very excited about that. So the rebranding showcases a pivot towards corporate learning and development, which is a much, much bigger market in addition to training management and we're also looking at LinkedIn, Viva Learning Integration.

So yes, it's one of our high-growth verticals. We always said that on top of our confidence platform, this data orchestration, security and governance platform, we are now showcasing vertical solutions as a way to continue to extend and increase into accounts and increased ARPU. So the education space is really a shiny example of success there.

[Brett Knoblauch, Cantor Fitzgerald]

That's helpful. And then maybe just one more on the share repurchase activity. I guess have you guys continued to buy since the end of the quarter, how should we think about that going forward? Is predetermine schedule or a bit more AdHoc?

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Yes. Good question. So up until through June 30, we had spent about $10 million in that buyback program. We did continue subsequent to the end of the year or end of June. And I would expect, right now, it's a little bit more systematic, but I would expect that we will spend roughly about $10 million as well in Q3. It may be a little bit - the beauty of the program that we have in place, as you know, it gives us flexibility. And one of the things we were looking to do in implementing a program like this was that we did have flexibility. It's been more systematic up until this point, but we do have the flexibility to kind of discontinue, restart and do a variety of things, and that flexibility is good as we think about other uses of cash over the next quarter as well, it gives us that flexibility to adjust.

[Brett Knoblauch, Cantor Fitzgerald]

That's very helpful. Thanks guys. Appreciate it.

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Thank you.

[Operator]

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to TJ for any closing remarks.

[Tianyi Jiang, CEO]

Thank you. I'd just like to say that we continue to make strong progress on our strategic priorities in this uncertain economic and geopolitical environment. Throughout our company's history, we have shown our ability to weather dynamic market environments by growing, while being prudent with expenditures.

Our go-to-market strategy positions us well for new logo acquisitions, a growing partner ecosystem and the ongoing expansion of existing customers to whom we deliver exceptional service today. This quarter, I had the opportunity to spend time in Munich with our EMEA leadership team and talk about the continued strong demand we see from our customers and partners, as well as the value we are providing with our solutions across complex deployment scenarios for their digital transformation initiatives.

And as I mentioned earlier, just last week, I was in Tokyo for the first time since the COVID pandemic, where I met with all of our top Japanese partners and saw firsthand how excited they are with AvePoint being able to help advise them and accelerate their SaaS transformation. This speaks to the robustness of our growing partner ecosystem.

We know it's a privilege to have our shareholder trust and faith in our ability to navigate the current market conditions, focus on consistent execution and ultimately deliver long-term shareholder value. Thank you.

[Operator]

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.