AvePoint Inc

NASDAQ:AVPT

Earnings Call Analysis

AvePoint Reports Strong Q3 Growth and Increased Profitability

AvePoint achieved remarkable Q3 results with total revenues of $88.8 million, a year-over-year growth of 22%. SaaS revenue surged by 45%, marking its highest growth in 11 quarters. The company reported a GAAP operating income of $17.8 million, outperforming expectations due to improved sales efficiency. Management raised full-year revenue guidance to between $327.8 million and $329.8 million, reflecting a 21% growth. They anticipate a non-GAAP operating income of approximately $45.8 million to $46.8 million. AvePoint's annual recurring revenue (ARR) reached approximately $325 million, highlighting a robust demand for its data management solutions in various sectors.

Strong Revenue Growth Driven by SaaS

In the third quarter of 2024, AvePoint reported total revenues of $88.8 million, marking a year-over-year growth of 22%, which exceeds their guidance and reflects an acceleration from the prior quarter. Notably, the company's SaaS revenue was particularly robust, amounting to $60.9 million and achieving a remarkable growth rate of 45% year-over-year. This growth underscores that SaaS continues to be the primary driver of the company's overall performance, reinforcing its strategic focus on this segment.

Record Net New ARR and Customer Expansion

AvePoint achieved a record net new Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of $18.8 million during Q3, representing a significant year-over-year growth of 31%. This performance can be attributed to a broader customer base, as the company added 35 new customers with ARR exceeding $100,000. The total customer count now stands at 629 for this segment, indicating a 21% increase from the previous year. As of September 30, the total ARR reached $308.9 million, achieving a solid year-over-year growth of 23%.

Improved Profitability and Cash Flow Generation

Not only did AvePoint surpass revenue expectations, but it also reported GAAP profitability for both the third quarter alone and the first nine months of 2024, contrasting significantly with a GAAP operating loss of $16.2 million in the same period last year. Q3 operating income hit $17.8 million, translating to an operating margin of 20.1%, reflecting an improvement of over 720 basis points year-over-year. Free cash flow also showed impressive growth, totaling $53.8 million year-to-date, compared to $11.8 million during the first nine months of 2023, showcasing robust cash management and increasing operational efficiency.

Strong Outlook with Raised Guidance

Looking ahead, AvePoint raised its full-year expectations after a strong performance. For Q4 2024, the company anticipates total revenues between $86.5 million and $88.5 million, equating to approximately 17% growth compared to the same period last year. They also project non-GAAP operating income between $12.6 million and $13.6 million. For the entire year, the new guidance expects ARR of $324.9 million to $326.9 million, representing a year-over-year growth of around 23%, with total revenues projected between $327.8 million and $329.8 million, translating to a growth of about 21%.

Expansion in Diverse Market Verticals

The company's growth is bolstered by its expanding presence in key verticals, including public sector institutions, healthcare, and education. For example, significant deals were secured, such as a major U.S. federal agency expanding its commitment to include an additional 20,000 users, now utilizing AvePoint's products for data governance and resilience. Another notable contract was won in the higher education sector, enhancing the company's reputation as an essential partner for organizations requiring transformative and mission-critical systems.

Rising Demand for Data Governance and AI Solutions

The market demand for AvePoint's solutions, particularly around data governance and security, continues to rise amid the growing integration of AI technologies. Their Confidence platform addresses the evolving requirements for comprehensive data management, enhancing security and compliance measures vital for organizations deploying generative AI tools. CEO TJ Jiang highlighted that organizations increasingly recognize the necessity of high-quality data management as part of their AI strategies, thereby positioning AvePoint to capitalize on considerable market opportunities.

Positive Market Reception and Strategic Positioning

Despite the competitive landscape, AvePoint's unique positioning has allowed it to effectively meet customer needs for automated governance and risk mitigation around data management. The successful execution of their strategic focus on providing comprehensive, scalable solutions, notably their distinct control and resilience suites, has resonated well with current and potential clients. This includes significant sales to financial institutions and public entities requiring robust data security protocols to support their operational integrity and responsiveness to regulatory demands.

Looking Forward: Commitment to Shareholder Value

Overall, AvePoint is committed to maintaining its trajectory of profitable growth while simultaneously enhancing shareholder value. With increased cash flow, strong ARR performance, and the successful execution of its strategic objectives, the company appears well-positioned to meet its long-term financial goals as it strives for continued improvements in both revenues and margins in the coming quarters.

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q3

[Operator]

Good day, and welcome to the AvePoint, Inc. Q3 2024 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded.



Now I'd like to turn the conference over to Jamie Arestia, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[James Arestia, executive]

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to AvePoint's Third Quarter 2024 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 gross profit, non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP operating income and non-GAAP operating margin, which are not measures prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The non-GAAP measures are presented in this presentation as we believe they provide investors with a means of understanding how management evaluates the company's operating performance. These non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation from, as substitutes 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 third quarter 2024 earnings press release as well as our updated investor presentation and financial tables, all of which are available on our Investor Relations website.



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

[Tianyi Jiang, executive]

Thank you, Jamie, and thank you to everyone joining us on the call today. The third quarter was an exceptional one for AvePoint as we built on the momentum and strength of the first half of the year, outperforming our expectations for the seventh consecutive quarter. We also demonstrated meaningful improvement on a number of key financial and operational metrics, which Jim will discuss in more detail.



Our results again reflect our steady focus on profitable growth and the ongoing demand for the AvePoint Confidence Platform, which is designed to enhance data security, governance and resilience. While these customer needs are not new, they have never been as high profile or as widespread as they are today. Companies worldwide increasingly are turning to AvePoint as they recognize the importance of high-quality data and the criticality of a robust data management strategy.



AvePoint's unmatched ability to establish these strategies for customers for more than 20 years makes us a perfect fit for this moment, where companies are rethinking data security in the age of generative AI and prioritizing platform solutions that deliver automated value across their multi-cloud environments. These dynamics position AvePoint exceptionally well to capitalize on the tremendous market opportunity ahead of us and provide us the confidence to again raise our expectations for the year.



Today, I'll talk about what we are seeing in the market and some key customer wins in the quarter. I'll then turn it over to Jim to cover our financial performance and updated financial guidance. I recently attended the Microsoft SMC APAC Conference, which brings together the top Microsoft partners in the region. A key topic was maximizing the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot in every conversation, whether with members of Microsoft's executive team or other top partners, it was clear that data security and data quality are key to delivering the potential that Gen AI solutions like Copilot offers. At the same time, the concept of data security is rapidly evolving in the age of AI. It goes beyond traditional security measures, extending to comprehensive data protection, quality data management, robust data governance and, of course, data security.



Traditional data security has focused on protecting the parameter, but that approach, while still important, is ultimately insufficient today. With the rise of Gen AI, businesses must shift to data-centric security, which focuses on protecting the data itself wherever it resides. What do we mean by this? Today, companies require a centralized data security posture, uniform approach to data governance, automated business processes, proactive and agile risk response and the ability to do all these things at scale.





The essential to this approach is the integration of strong data governance and data protection practices. Effective governance ensures that data is properly managed, accessible and compliant with regulations, while data protection measures like encryption and access controls secure sensitive information. Without these practices, the true value of generative AI simply cannot be realized.



Gartner found at least 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof of concepts by the end of 2025 due to poor data quality and inadequate risk controls. And by 2027, 60% of organizations will fail to realize the anticipated value of their AI use cases due to incohesive data governance frameworks.



Seamlessly, addressing these widespread problems is precisely what the AvePoint Confidence platform solves. We enable security, business and IT leaders to automate data governance for unstructured data, including the right security controls, business process automation, monitoring and analytics to simplify data security and successfully implement generative AI.



Our platform approach, which offers a one-stop solution to the most universal data management challenges continues to resonate with customers and prospects and led to strong new logo acquisition and significant customer expansions in the third quarter. I want to highlight a few of these wins, which encapsulate organizations of all sizes and verticals from all around the world.



Financial institutions deal with vast amounts of sensitive unstructured data and the integration of AI capabilities for fraud detection, customer service automation and risk assessments inherently introduces risks like data privacy breaches, unauthorized access and bias in AI algorithms. This is the exact use case leading to a significant customer expansion with a prominent global online payment processing company.



Already a customer of our Resilience suite, the company required enhanced data security and governance measures before rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to their 40,000 users. They purchased three Control suite products to provide a robust and scalable framework that will drive the success of their AI transformation.



We also welcomed a Canada-based insurance company with 35,000 users as a new customer in the quarter, which required a robust solution to improve workspace governance attestation across its environment. They purchased five products across our control suite to enable comprehensive data access governance, real-time monitoring of their data security posture and automation of their compliance reporting.



Switching to the health care industry. We're safeguarding patient data and complying with strict regulations is nonnegotiable. To do so, companies must have robust automated data governance and resilient protection plans in place to uphold their organizational reputation and operational viability. We welcomed a U.S.-based health care provider with 35,000 users in the quarter, which purchased our entire control suite of products to address risks related to their sensitive data.



With AvePoint, they can now implement a scalable framework to automate data governance, uncover actionable risk insights and enable proactive policy enforcement, reducing data security risk and optimizing their operations. Complying with strict regulations is equally critical in the public sector, where inadequate data management can result not only in breaches of sensitive citizen information and operational inefficiencies, but also undermine public trust and disrupt the delivery of essential services.



Public sector institutions represent our largest overall vertical, and the team had another strong quarter signing new logos and expanding existing customers' deployments. A major Japanese municipal government with more than 20,000 users implemented the entire control suite in the third quarter, citing our ability to automatically govern data across their large and complex digital environment and support their overall data management goals.



Another win was a key U.S. agency responsible for overseeing judiciary operations. which faced significant data protection challenges. With more than 30,000 users, their existing manual backup process proved cumbersome and unreliable. And the recent loss of critical case information highlighted the need for a more robust solution, especially with increasing ransomware threats.



They chose AvePoint's FedRAMP-certified secure data resilience product to implement an automated, reliable backup system that ensure data integrity and compliance, in turn, positioning them to better protect critical information and respond to data loss and external threats. We were also pleased that in the third quarter, a U.S. federal agency responsible for approximately 2% of our total ARR, meaningfully expanded their AvePoint commitment to another 20,000 users.



Today, they rely on our control and resilience suites to comply with the stringent regulatory requirements for their 115,000 users as the AvePoint Confidence platform enables them to address complex record management needs, identify and secure sensitive data and gain control over the workspace provisioning and information life cycle management.



The other vertical I would like to quickly highlight is higher education. In the third quarter, we had an 8-figure deal in APAC region with a prominent institution to replace their on-premises system with a modern centralized enterprise student management system with a MaivenPoint platform. This win strengthens our role as a key provider of innovative and mission-critical systems that meet the evolving needs of the higher education sector.



While it's clear our solutions position organizations to deliver meaningful business outcomes in the future, we also can show them a substantial return on their investments right away. A great example of this is a leading global design and engineering consultancy based in the U.K., which was utilizing a staggering one petabyte of data.



This overuse was not only costly but also unsustainable, and they embarked on a rigorous selection process, evaluating solutions from six different vendors. They ultimately choose the secure data protection and information management solutions from our Resilience suite, enabling them to quickly reduce their backup costs as well as archive and delete their redundant and obsolete data.



This will immediately translate to substantial cost savings and a more streamlined data management process, and we're already discussing additional products like [ tyGraph ] to further enhance their data management capabilities. This partnership exemplifies how the breadth of our platform allows us to address multiple complex data challenges while delivering both immediate and long-term value.



To conclude, AvePoint is uniquely positioned to address the critical challenges of data security, governance and resilience. Our platform approach and our ongoing innovation differentiates us from the point tools in the market and ensures that our clients can drive transformative outcomes while effectively navigating a complex multi-SaaS digital landscape. I am extremely proud of the team's accomplishments this quarter, and we're excited for a strong close to the year.



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

[James Caci, executive]

Thank you, TJ, and thank you to everyone for joining this afternoon as we report another quarter of strong results. This strength is evident not only as we review our performance against our guided metrics of revenue and operating income, but also as we go a level deeper and look at our top-line results by geography, customer segment and vertical where the team's broad-based execution translated into record net new ARR of nearly $19 million in the quarter.



We achieved this while closely managing every P&L line and driving significant year-over-year operating leverage, delivering record quarterly non-GAAP operating income of $17.8 million. And in turn, our improved profitability position has led to record cash flow generation as year-to-date, we have generated $56.1 million in operating cash flow and $53.8 million in free cash flow.



I'll discuss these items in more detail shortly. But suffice to say, we are investing in profitable growth, executing on our strategic priorities and strengthening our brand, all of which leave us well positioned to continue delivering value to AvePoint's shareholders while we progress toward our Rule of 40 and GAAP profitability targets in 2025.



With that, let's turn to our results. For the third quarter ended September 30, total revenues were $88.8 million, representing year-over-year growth of 22%, an acceleration from the second quarter and above the high end of our guidance. SaaS continues to be the driver of our overall business. And in the third quarter, SaaS revenue was $60.9 million, growing 45% year-over-year, the highest growth rate we have delivered in 11 quarters. We are also pleased that on a sequential basis, SaaS revenue grew 13%, the highest rate we have delivered as a public company. And in Q3, SaaS comprised 69% of total revenues compared to 58% a year ago.



Moving to our other revenue lines. Term license and support was $14.1 million, continuing its expected decline, but representing a higher percentage of total revenues than in the first 2 quarters, given the typically higher demand for term license that we see from our North America public sector customers in Q3.



Maintenance revenue, which, to remind you, is tied to our legacy perpetual licenses also declined as expected year-over-year, both in dollars and as a percentage of revenues and represented 3% of total Q3 revenues.



Lastly, services revenue was $10.8 million and represented 12% of total Q3 revenues and continues to trend closer to our longer-term target of 10%. And because services is our only nonrecurring revenue stream, our recurring revenue mix in the third quarter was 88%, representing another record for the business. Switching now to our regional performance, where the balance of our geographic footprint is one of the many things that makes AvePoint unique within enterprise software. Today, approximately 40% of our revenues come from North America, 30% from EMEA and 30% from APAC. In the third quarter, we saw strong performance across the board, driven by our SaaS business, which grew above 40% in all 3 regions.



In North America, SaaS revenues grew 46% year-over-year and represented 70% of total North America revenues, which in turn grew 19% year-over-year. In EMEA, SaaS revenues grew 41% year-over-year and represented 84% of total EMEA revenues, which in turn grew 21% year-over-year. And in APAC, SaaS revenues grew 50% year-over-year and represented 50% of total APAC revenues, which in turn grew 29% year-over-year. The same broad-based strength is apparent when looking at our year-over-year growth in regional ARR, a metric we began disclosing this year to provide a better view of the underlying momentum of the business everywhere we operate.



In Q3, North America ARR grew 20%, EMEA ARR grew 25% and APAC ARR grew 27% as each region was a strong contributor to the 23% consolidated ARR growth we reported. Continuing now with total ARR and other key metrics we assess on a quarterly basis. As of September 30, total ARR surpassed the $300 million mark, ending the quarter at $308.9 million. As mentioned, this represented year-over-year growth of 23%. As a result, net new ARR in Q3 was a record $18.8 million and grew 31% year-over-year, the highest organic growth rate we have delivered as a public company.



Additionally, we ended Q3 with 629 customers with ARR of over $100,000, a 21% increase from the prior year and a net addition of 35 such customers from Q2, which represented the most we have ever added in a single quarter. As of the end of Q3, 53% of total ARR came through the channel compared to 50% a year ago. And for Q3 specifically, 68% of our incremental ARR came through the channel compared to 61% for Q2 of 2024 and 72% for Q3 of 2023.



Turning now to our customer retention rates. Adjusted for the impact of FX, our trailing 12-month gross retention rate for the third quarter increased to 88%, and we are pleased to see this key metric improve to the highest AvePoint has reported to date. At the same time, our FX-adjusted net retention rate for the third quarter was 110%, an improvement from the 108% we were delivered a year ago and in line with Q2. On a reported basis, Q3 GRR was 87% compared to 85% in Q3 of 2023 and a 1-point improvement from the prior quarter. Q3 reported NRR was 109% compared to 107% in Q3 of 2023 and in line with Q2.



Turning back to the income statement. Gross profit for Q3 was $68.4 million, representing a gross margin of 77% compared to 73.7% in Q3 of 2023 and to 76.2% in Q2 of 2024. Similar to the first half of the year, the improvement in our gross margin is primarily the result of our product mix in Q3 as we again had more SaaS revenue and less services revenue as a percentage of our overall revenue. In addition, we saw improved SaaS margins this quarter compared to last year.



Moving down the income statement, operating expenses for Q3 totaled $50.5 million or 57% of revenues compared to $44.3 million or 61% of revenues a year ago. As a result, Q3 operating income was $17.8 million or an operating margin of 20.1%, a year-over-year improvement of more than 720 basis points. Q3 operating income was well ahead of our guidance. And similar to last quarter, the outperformance was primarily driven by 2 factors: first, the meaningful revenue beat, most of which flowed to the bottom line; and second, improved sales efficiency and prudent expense management across the business. These areas of focus were most pronounced at the sales and marketing line, which represented 31% of Q3 revenues and when looking at our total operating expenses, which, as mentioned, was 57% of Q3 revenues. Both of these percentages were the healthiest we have reported as a public company.



Taken together, our ongoing commitment to profitable growth resulted in another step on our path to full year GAAP profitability. And to this point, we are pleased to have achieved GAAP profitability in the third quarter as well as for the first 9 months of 2024, with cumulative GAAP operating income of $2.3 million. This compares to a GAAP operating loss of $16.2 million in the first 9 months of 2023.



Turning to the balance sheet and statement of cash flows, we ended the third quarter with $250 million in cash and short-term investments. And as mentioned, for the 9 months ended September 30, cash generated from operations was $56.1 million, while free cash flow was $53.8 million. This compares to cash generated from operations of $13.3 million and free cash flow of $11.8 million in the first 9 months of 2023.



During the 3 months ended September 30, we repurchased 219,000 shares for a total cost of approximately $2.6 million. I would now like to turn to our financial outlook, where for the full year, we are pleased to again raise our expectations for total ARR, total revenues and non-GAAP operating income. For the fourth quarter, we expect total revenues of $86.5 million to $88.5 million or approximately 17% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. We expect non-GAAP operating income of $12.6 million to $13.6 million. And for the full year, we now expect total ARR of $324.9 million to $326.9 million or approximately 23% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. This implies net new ARR for the year of $61.4 million or year-over-year growth of 23% at the midpoint. 





We now expect total revenues of $327.8 million to $329.8 million or approximately 21% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. And given these higher top line expectations, again, coupled with our outperformance on profitability this quarter, we now expect full year non-GAAP operating income of $45.8 million to $46.8 million or an operating margin of 14% at the midpoint, which represents a year-over-year expansion of 590 basis points. 



Lastly, on a Rule of 40 basis, which for AvePoint is the sum of ARR growth and non-GAAP operating margin, our updated guidance today reflects a 37%. This compares to the 29% that we initially guided for the year in February to the 31% we guided to in May and to the 33% that we guided to in August. In summary, we are proud of our Q3 results, and the team remains laser-focused on profitable growth and continued execution as we deliver value to organizations around the world. Thanks for joining us today. And with that, we would be happy to take your questions. Operator?

[Operator]

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

[Jason Ader, analyst]

First question, I guess, is if you would be kind enough to provide any relative growth rates across the different suites that you sell. That would be helpful.

[James Caci, executive]

Jason, it's Jim Cassie. Thanks for the question. So I know that's something that we're providing on an annual basis. I would say that for at least this point, at this point in the year, we would expect to see the suites relatively similar to last year in terms of comparison. We are seeing additionally, and TJ even mentioned in the script, much more focus around control from our customers. So we would expect to see improvement there. But overall, similar to what we've seen in the past with, again, a little bit more focus on control.

[Jason Ader, analyst]

Okay. Excellent. And then a quick follow-up. maybe for you, TJ, just as we think about the net new ARR performance and the growth there year-over-year, which was well above the total ARR growth. How would you kind of summarize what's going well for you guys right now that's driving this net new ARR performance?

[Tianyi Jiang, executive]

Jason, thank you for the question. Yes, we are very excited to see the net new incremental ARR growth. We have multiple strong segments. Historically, we're very strong in enterprise. We remain so. And as discussed in the past calls, our strongest, highest growth segmentation come from the SMB segment with our very laser focus on managed service providers as a segmentation. So that continued to drive outsized net new logo acquisitions as well as net new ARR. 



And just to go back to your previous point that Jim answered. So governance and security really go hand-in-hand together, and governance is really our control suite and security is really exified by the resilience suite. So we see a lot more of our platform strength and play that's helping us really win in the market.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And the next question comes from Brett Knoblauch with Cantor Fitzgerald.

[Brett Knoblauch, analyst]

Congrats on the great quarter. It seems like everything is hitting on all cylinders. TJ, I was wondering if you could maybe just point to 1 or 2 things that you think is really allowing you guys to deliver the growth you're getting across all regions, it seems like all customer sizes. Is there only 1 or 2 things, maybe the proliferation of AI that you could point to? Or how should we think about the continued strength here?

[Tianyi Jiang, executive]

Brett, yes, that's a good question. We really do see consistent growth, high growth across all of our major 3 geographies in North America, EMEA and APAC. What's driving a lot of growth continue to be what we discussed in the previous quarters of this need for data governance and control and, of course, around security and resiliency. So these things are continue to be very, very strong growth vectors for us. 



And lastly, we also have our data migration integration play in modernization. That continue to be a massive door opener for us. We see a lot more uptake in Microsoft Gen AI capabilities. So that led to migration opportunities as well from other clouds. So that would never end the migration path between multi cloud environments between multi-hyperscalers. And even within same cloud platforms, there's always divestitures, M&As and reconsolidation of tenants and split of tenants. So that continues to be the tip of the spear for us. So yes, we're pleased to see all 3 major product suites and functional areas on our SaaS competence platform to grow very strongly across all regions.

[Brett Knoblauch, analyst]

Perfect. And Jim, maybe a question for you on the gross retention. I think it was the first time we saw that tick up since you guys first started disclosing it a little bit ways back. Anything you can point to that kind of drove that tick up? And is that something we should expect to continue to improve over the immediate term? Or I guess, your 90% target there, over what time frame should we expect that?

[James Caci, executive]

Yes, great question. So you're right, that 90% target is, I would say, at this point, probably a medium term. So we're looking at the next couple of years of trying to get to that 90%. So we were definitely encouraged to see us pick up here 1% to get to that 88%. I think we're seeing good performance really from each region. Strong performance in Q3 in our public sector, which continues to outperform kind of the consolidated results, both in GRR and NRR. So that was a good contributor. 



We've also made some changes this year in terms of how we think about the long tail, kind of that ARR base that doesn't receive dedicated CS is maybe a little bit lower in terms of ARR balance. But we've done a bunch of things around pooled CS and really focusing on how we can service that team and that really customer base better. And we've seen already the first 9 months of this year, we've seen improvement, and we've seen some meaningful improvement in terms of that GRR base. So that was definitely a contributor. 



And we're again, we're investing heavily there. So we would expect to see that continue. So I think we've made good progress toward that 90%, and we're going to continue to work toward that. And hopefully, in the next couple of years, we get there.

[Operator]

And the next question comes from Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets.

[Nehal Chokshi, analyst]

Congrats on the great results. TJ, so you talked about how Gen AI transformed security needs to be data security centric, which I believe is more focused on your resilience suite. And I get that you say that they are the resilience suite and control suite work hand-in-hand with respect to AI. But how does Gen AI transform privileged access from user-centric to data-centric, which would be more focused around your control suite?

[Tianyi Jiang, executive]

Nehal, great question. So there's actually a lot of access control and privileged access flavors when it comes to specifically Microsoft 365 Copilot. So because, as you know, that's actually very much tied to the Office Graph. So the access of particular assets in the cloud and what kind of assets you have is very important, and that's what drives the Copilot recommendations to a particular user. So we're seeing very large obviously, experimentations, but also now increasingly a few large enterprise-wide deployments of Microsoft 365 Copilot on the premises of deploying actually our control suite. 



So we actually announced this in the previous earnings as well with a major global financial institution. And in this quarter, we continue to see that with a major customer take-up. So it does go together both from a permission management life cycle governance as well as security in the resilience side. So they do really it's not just the actual data itself, the quality control, essentially maintaining a high-quality daily state, but also the access rights management of that, too.

[Nehal Chokshi, analyst]

Okay. And then Jim, did you give the -- what was the FX impact on the reported ARR?

[James Caci, executive]

The FX impact, no, we didn't disclose that, but it's about 1%. The ARR would have been slightly higher by about 1%.

[Operator]

And the next question comes from Kirk Materne with Evercore ISI Institutional Equities

[S. Kirk Materne, analyst]

Congrats on the results. TJ, curious I don't know if you could parse this out, but I was curious how much do you think the acceleration is sort of you all getting reprioritized higher in the IT spending budget versus budgets just getting a little bit more unlocked. And I'm sure there's a little bit of perhaps both going on. I was just kind of curious, how much of is this about your products getting pulled faster to the top of the spending list versus sort of a little bit of a macro unlock potentially?

[Tianyi Jiang, executive]

Yes, Kirk, that's a great question. There's -- you're definitely right. There's definitely a little bit of both. Initially, when you talk about AI experimentations, a lot of firms are actually using a separate budget outside of traditional IT spend to do the experimentation. And once that happens, to the extent that the firm decide to do a firm-wide rollout, especially around M65 Copilot that's tied to their Office 65 Microsoft Office cloud spend, then they actually primarily goes into a primary bucket. So it's happening on both sides of the house.



It does highlight the need for the importance of governance and control and life cycle management, something that traditionally only regulated industry enterprises and government care a lot about, but also everybody cares about it because as we know, your AI is only as good as the quality of your data. So that's definitely raising the priority for all the companies that want to deploy AI to be mindful of their data quality and data state. We actually cited a number of statistics from Gartners and others to say the quality of the AI experimentation and success rates that folks are seeing are really directly tied to their overall data management posture. So this is definitely raising the awareness across industries.

[S. Kirk Materne, analyst]

Okay. And Jim, just a quick one for you. The implied guide for -- or just the guide for fourth-quarter operating margins, is there -- is that sort of a baseline to think about as we think about next year just in terms of how you want to start the year? I wasn't sure if there's any -- obviously, revenue be dropped down this quarter. So the guide is lower for next quarter. Just how should we think about sort of incremental expenses coming into next quarter and perhaps sort of how we should think about to start calendar '25, knowing you're not giving official guidance?

[James Caci, executive]

Yes, great point. Yes, we'll provide guidance for next year probably in February. But it's a good point. We definitely are guiding lower for operating income in Q4. I don't know if I would read a ton into that in terms of the expectation moving forward. I think if you look historically, Q4 for us has been a higher spend quarter. And that's a combination really of how we budget and how some of our -- what we refer to as programmatic spend.



We definitely have more marketing spend in Q4 and some other initiatives. It's just not necessarily linear throughout the year. So there's definitely some ebbs and flows and Q4 historically has been a higher spend quarter, and that's going to continue this year. So that's really a function. We also mentioned that we had about $1 million of spend moved from Q3 into Q4. So that's also a contributing factor.

[Operator]

And the next question comes from Derrick Wood with TD Cowen.

[Unknown Analyst]

This is Cole on for Derrick. Great quarter. TJ, one for you. There's been a lot of buzz around AI agents the past couple of months. How do you think these are going to shape demand for control suite going forward? Do you see adoption of agents as kind of this like incremental driver on top of Copilot -- or just I'd love to get more color on that.

[Tianyi Jiang, executive]

Yes, that's a great question. Agents will continue to evolve. There's actually -- it's still in very, very early stages. If you can't get a good quality output from your current AI deployments given a poor data estate, deploying agents would just make it even worse because there's so much more automation introduced. I would say that what this actually new development and new areas and trending, it's very exciting for us as overall a B2B SaaS provider in that I really think in the next 3 to 5 years, fundamentally, the way software are being deployed, not only just developed now everyone is using GitHub Copilot, those type of AI accelerated dev tools, it's going to change, right, with the agent introduction.



So the way software is actually going to be deployed out there will change drastically in the next few years. But right now, we're still in very early innings of agents. And again, it points to -- if you want to introduce more automation, intelligent automation, you need to get the core and foundation right. This is why we're becoming more mission-critical with that whole day-to- state management and quality management.

[Unknown Analyst]

Great. Really helpful. And then, Jim, maybe one for you. Good margin outperformance. You called out in the prepared remarks a couple of points. I just want to dig in on the improved sales efficiency. Is that just kind of a natural step as reps get more ramped and get more productive? Or are there any kind of specific initiatives that are driving this?

[James Caci, executive]

Yes. No, great question. And I think it's a little bit of everything you just said. We definitely are seeing better productivity from our reps. I think we pointed that out in the prior 2 quarters as well. We've seen that in terms of rep productivity of our longer-term reps, but also our newer reps ramping faster and getting to first sale faster. So that's definitely been a factor. And then I think it's also the continued maturing of our channel strategy. We pointed out, obviously, more and more business coming through the channel. And I think for us, that's a much more efficient play as well. And I think you're seeing all of that kind of play into our progress.

[Operator]

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

[Tianyi Jiang, executive]

Thank you for joining us today. Our strong third quarter results underscore our ability to help customers and partners achieve AI-driven transformation with comprehensive and scalable data management and governance solutions. Our platform approach and ongoing innovation uniquely position AvePoint to tackle the critical challenges of data security, governance and resilience in today's complex multi- SaaS digital landscape.



In meeting with our management teams, customers and partners worldwide over the last several weeks, I'm confident we have the right market position, technology and people to close 2024 strong and seize the massive opportunities ahead of us. We look forward to speaking with you more this quarter. Thank you.

[Operator]

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