Before I introduce the gentleman who's going to be speaking, I just want to remind you that if you want to ask questions, you can add that at the bottom of your screen and we'll endeavor to get through them after the formal part of this presentation. But without further ado, let me introduce you to the CEO, Charif Elansari, and the CFO, Bill Kyriacou, who will be speaking in turn. Once they've completed, we'll come back and we'll get the Q&A session underway. But without any further ado, let me pass over to you, Charif. Thank you. Thank you. And I want to thank everybody who's joining us today for our Q1, the March update. I know you, everybody's busy, and I really appreciate strong showing today for our webinar. I'm gonna open and give an overall update for the quarter, as usual. And then what we'll do is that we'll have Bill, our CFO, cover the financials, then I do closing remarks, and then we open it up for about 20 minutes of Q&A. Overall, we had a solid and well-balanced quarter in March. We grew top line by north of 30%, delivered cash flow positive, and good gross margins, as you saw. We continue to see strong demand for data protection and equally strong validation for our scalable, partner-first business model. Hence, we continued investing in the business, namely in things that really matter, which is go-to-market and technology functions. This underlies a strong belief in our gross prospects, and that's underpinned with a lot of white space remaining, as we've talked about before, with this, like, you know, 400+ million-plus just Office 365 and Google Workspace seats out there, and we still see 80% white space in the market. We continue to grow our partner base. We continue to see meaningful tailwinds all around: cybersecurity, regulation, and, of course, we continue building a strong team and a strong culture that really helps us scale the business to the next level. Now, as we put our in our presentation and our written document, we did see more churn in the MSP business, which was more than our typical 3%. It's still single-digit. It's still sub-4%, and it is something that we're addressing, and we can talk about it in the subsequent slides. So when Bill talks about it, of course, we can talk about it in the Q&A as well. At the same time, we continue to build a strong funnel. We continued signing and adding distributors and MSP partners. We continued enhancing the value proposition for our MSP community, adding a respectable number of new seats, you know, globally. A couple of highlights on the product and go-to-market that I'd like to also talk about here. The first is we did a material enhancement in our seamless integration capabilities. This is something we talked about before. One way by which Dropsuite differentiates itself in the market is by having a very tight integration into our partners' ERP systems. In our channel, it's called PSA, Professional Services Automation. So the team has done a phenomenal job. We launched a very successful marketplace for this, so we expect to do more and more, and further strengthen our seamless integration with our partners. The second is we have introduced something called the Point-in-Time Restore. Think about it as basically taking a snapshot and being able to restore the snapshot as it was, three months ago, six months ago, one year ago. Now, that is combined with our continuous ability to back up nonstop, right, and restore nonstop, and that is a very strong differentiator and a very unique way of restoring data. And remember, restoring data is why we exist, right, to be able to protect our MSPs and their end customers in case of data loss. Thirdly, we also continued streamlining and speeding up the partner service, which is the service by which we introduced in beta in Q4 to help our MSP partners who don't have time and resources to migrate backup data from other vendors into Dropsuite. We have more work to be done there, but we've made some very strong improvements in automating a good part of that process to make sure that we migrate the users. Hence, we charge for this migration. And also, of course, that will help us accelerate ARR and monthly recurring revenue in Q2 and beyond. So we've done some in Q4, obviously. We've done some in Q1, but we see more opportunities for us to migrate more of the seats from competitors into Dropsuite in Q2 and the second half of the year. From a go-to-market standpoint, obviously, we, we continue expanding our partner-served funnel. We had a strong addition of new MSP partners, both direct and indirect, including distribution partners, especially in EMEA. One thing that we did, which is now public information, is we launched an alliance with two of the best email security companies in the world, and that is Proofpoint and SentinelOne. And that's in collaboration with one of our strategic distributors called Pax8, which is one of the largest cloud distributors in the world. And this combination of products, which is Proofpoint, SentinelOne, and Dropsuite, strengthens the value proposition to MSPs and their end clients in a big way, when it comes to email protection. So a lot of activities, a lot of good activities that are adding value, that are building the funnel, as we go through the remainder of 2024. With that, I'd like to ask our CFO, Bill, to provide the financial update before he passes it back to me. Thank you. Thanks, Adrian and Charif. Thank you to all attendees for your time today. In this financial overview, we'll present our key business metrics and cash flow. As we exit the March quarter, we continue our ARR momentum with solid quarter-on-quarter growth. We saw consistent, constant currency ARR growth across our partner base, up 7% quarter-on-quarter and 31% PCP, with actual growth of 9% on prior quarter positively impacted by the FX movements in that quarter. Our gross margin was in line with expectations in prior quarters at 69%. We continue to add capacity each quarter as we add new users, and our focus on optimizing on our storage tiers. Our ARPU increased circa 1% quarter-on-quarter on a constant currency basis, with continued product mix shift to our Archiving and Compliance product. Our operating cash flow was solid in Q1, with circa AUD 400,000 positive cash flow generated, which has been normalized with the fluctuation in timing of cash receipts, which were strong in the quarter, and our payments to suppliers, which were seasonally increased on account of annual subscriptions, insurances, and staff performance bonus payments. Dropsuite has achieved consistent and material paid user growth year-over-year with a 22% increased PCP. We have increased our MSP network by adding greater than 1,200 transacting MSP partners over the last 12 months, which we see as a leading indicator for future seat growth. We ended the quarter with 1.24 million paid users, where we added 73,000 new paid users in the March quarter. We noted, as Charif touched on just before, an increase in revenue churn to the sub-5%. Historically, we've been sub-3%, and this was primarily due to pricing competition, especially in the EMEA region. And we are, with the company is introducing the necessary measures to address and mitigate that churn going forward. Our key takeaways for our key metrics remain as consistent growth across each quarter on ARR, on ARPU, paid user growth, along with solid cash receipts growth, with track to our ARR growth, and with OpEx to revenue ratio in Q1 in line with our reinvestment strategies that we executed in Q1 of last year. We continue to scale OpEx across all functions with a focus on R&D and go-to-market while managing profitability and cash flow to 2023 levels. Q1 delivered robust positive operating cash flow generation of circa $400,000 for the quarter. Cash receipts were strong in Q1 while noting we've also normalized some cash receipts due to timing fluctuations from customers. There was also some positive impact on AUD cash receipts, with the AUD/USD rate depreciating quarter-on-quarter, with the majority of our cash receipts collected in USD. Payments to suppliers increased 13% in Q1, factoring in seasonal annual payments that we mentioned earlier. Pleasingly, our cloud hosting costs have reduced in dollar terms against prior quarter, with the benefit of higher gross margins. We will see fluctuations within each quarter for cash flow, but we manage on an annual basis rather than on a quarterly basis on that. Dropsuite continues to reinvest into scaling the business for future profitable growth, supported by the continued cash flow generation and profitability, and we remain well-capitalized to invest per our 2024 capital allocation and growth framework. Thank you, Bill, for the overview. As you can see here, our focus is to continue investing in the business, specifically on technology R&D on one side and also on go-to-market. We want to continue investing and to invest in scaling our platform for millions of users, continue enhancing the value proposition for our partners through continuous improvement of our products and services, and also introducing new capabilities and also new products, which we did announce earlier that we intend to launch one product in the second half of 2024. We still have some work to be done to strengthen our go-to-market initiatives. Geo expansion comes to mind to markets like APAC, Germany, Canada, to name top geos that we consider important and completely under-penetrated. We continue enhancing our tech support. This is the partner-facing support through a slew of continuous improvements, including self-service help center, which helps us become more efficient. And, of course, we've been using quite a bit of AI to reduce the burden on the team, but more importantly, to solve the MSP problems as quickly as humanly possible. On the other hand, we're also enhancing our service by introducing weekend support and eventually 24/7 support for our partners. And, of course, we have invested and will invest in partner success, and that would play an important role in improving our partners' lifetime value, and the longevity of the revenue and the seats that MSPs have with Dropsuite. The bottom line here is that we will focus our investment on areas that would deliver a more scalable, stronger, and larger company. Going on to the next slide, we're doing this in an orderly manner, right? We have developed, and we have a very well-defined framework where we allocate capital, based on a quadrant around existing partners, existing products, which, again, we continue to see a lot of white space there, introducing new capabilities for new markets like, for example, government cloud in the United States, which started to see more and more traction in Q1, and we continue to be bullish on that, and, of course, introducing new products both organically and inorganically, as the time passed by. Organic means we introduce new products, built by our team. Inorganic means, M&A. And finally, in closing before reopening it up for Q&A, we continue wanting to affirm our optimism about our future, about our growth prospects, about the fact that we have a market-leading position, specifically when it comes to Microsoft 365 backup and archiving, and, of course, while building a strong team and a strong culture. With that, over to you, Adrian, so we can start the Q&A session. Thank you, Charif. Unmuting. So thank you, thank you very much. Just a reminder to those on the call, if you wanted to ask a question in the Q&A section, you can add them in there, and we'll endeavor to get through all of them. Charif, we've got a number that have come in, so not surprisingly with such a big group on the call. So let me start with the first one, and it's either yourself, and perhaps Bill can follow on as well. So on ARR specifically, so with, you know, Q1 now out of the way, could you frame how we should think about growth over the rest of the year? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for asking the question this way because we don't give specific outlooks to the market, but we do give some high-level indications. So if you look at our ARR growth, the incremental quarter-over-quarter ARR growth that we see—and this is a big measure of how we measure success internally in the company, and I encourage shareholders and investors to look at it the same way—we average about $1.45 million of quarterly incremental ARR in 2023, right? The first quarter in Q1 2024—this ARR net ARR growth quarter-over-quarter was $1.6 million, right? So obviously, as we continue reinvesting in the business, our expectations is that we continue improving that number on a year-over-year basis. and that's how I would frame the ARR growth, expectations and intentions, going forward. Yeah. Thanks, Charif. Next one. This could be one for you, Bill. Can you please quantify the amount of seasonal costs? I think you made mention of this already, but the amount of seasonal costs that were in the quarter. Yeah. We, we did note, Adrian, that seasonal costs included annual subscriptions, annual insurances, and annual performance staff performance bonus payouts. We don't give the specifics around that, but if you look at the trend for the last Q1s in the last few years, you can see that there was a specific increase around those key areas for each of those quarters. Thanks, Bill. Next one, one probably for you, Charif. So seat adds for Q1 FY 2024 were below my expectations, and you mentioned momentum through the year. Can you please talk through your thoughts on seat add momentum, you know, by quarter through the year? Yeah. I would say that, my commentary would be very similar to what I just covered when it comes to annualized recurring revenue. At the end of the day, annualized recurring revenue is the name of the game, right? And annualized recurring revenue is simply average revenue per user times number of users times 12, and that's how you get to ARR. Our position is that we have high expectations of what we and the team can deliver, right? And our expectations is that, as we're holding ourselves accountable to delivering better growth, in dollar terms versus 2023. Thanks, Charif. There's a couple of questions on churn, so let me kind of try to group them. So you mentioned churn was higher in the first quarter due to pricing, but can you elaborate some more on what strategies you might put in place to combat the churn? Yeah. One big takeaway from the churn that we saw is that the majority of it is coming from partners who are buying our products and services through wholesalers or distributors. And then, if for folks who are familiar with our business model, we either sell directly to the managed service provider or we sell to the MSP, the managed service provider, via a wholesaler or a distributor, right? And what we saw is when we don't do enough touches or we don't work with these MSP partners, we see higher churn. So one thing that we're doing is that we're extending the responsibility of our partner success team to not only dealing with direct partners but also dealing with indirect partners so they can be completely apprised of our product enhancements, feature enhancements with partner serve, with improving support, help center 24/7, weekend support, etc., etc., etc., to bolster the value proposition. And that's what we've started doing in Q1. We expect to continue doing it in the subsequent quarter. Again, the key takeaway is that the majority of this churn happened through these indirect partners. And remember, we are a team of small to moderate size, and we have now about 4,500 partners. So ensuring we have the right number of partner success managers and representatives to do that is what we've been doing, which is reinvesting in the business to ensure that we can cover and support all these users. And when I say support, I don't mean just technical support. I mean support for growth, for churn reduction, and for additional seats and also upsell to our higher-end SKUs like Archiving and Compliance. That is the most important thing that we have set to do, and we continue to improve on; we will continue to improve on this regard. At the same time, I mean, I don't want to give a specific outlook on churn. I can tell you what we're doing, what's within our control, so we can address the churn while keeping in mind that annual churn is still below 5%, which is highly respected. Yeah. Thank you, Charif. Good answer. So you've made reference to MSPs. So just and you some of this has already been in your answer, but you might want to expand a bit further. So you've added a large number of MSPs over the last year. So what is your approach to making these partners larger in value, and what is the strategy to maintain these partnerships, so you know, and drive the business? Yeah. The answer is twofold. One is what we just covered, which is really strengthening partner success and partner support across the board, right? You know, from education to training to touching base and communicating about our product enhancements to having more and more quarterly check-ins with all our partners or as much as possible with all our partners. That is going to be important. The other one that really helps us scale this so we can go from 4,000, 5,000 MSPs to 10,000 MSPs is what we call automating the customer journey, which is how do you have touchpoints throughout the lifetime of the customer or the MSP, right? From the day they get onboarded all the way to when they add the first 100 seats and then the next 500 seats and the next 1,000 seats. And then as they evolve from a customer journey standpoint, we have a nuanced way of communicating and reaching to these partners at scale. So we need to do the automated piece, and we need to do also the high-touch piece depending, of course, on the value of the MSP and the lifetime value of the MSP. This lifetime journey, which will automate quite a bit in terms of how we do things, is expected to be launched in Q3, which will also be of help and support and add value to the overall MSP experience when working with Dropsuite. Thanks, Charif. Next question is probably for you, Bill. DSE exited FY23 with a record gross margin of 70%. How should we think about the balance of the year post this first quarter? Yeah. Thanks, Adrian. So we did exit in December of last year at 70%. For the full year 2023, we're at high 80s, high 68%, apologies. And we do expect the gross margin percentage for 2024 on an annual basis to be in line with 2023 margins. As we say that, we continue to work on these avenues to improve our gross margin in the mid to long term as well. Thanks, Bill. Next question. Well, I'm probably still with you, Bill. So, so you've previously stated an expectation to maintain cash flow and profitability in line with FY23. Can you talk about how you see operating costs for the balance of the year post this first quarter? Yeah. Like you mentioned, the intention that we have is for our profitability and our cash flow to remain positive and within dollar terms in line with 2023. We do still see a need to continue to invest in the business itself, core products, new products, new markets that we have there. As per our roadmap, we will continue to invest for the rest of 2024 on that basis and on the basis of our capital allocation framework that we've got set up. Thanks, Bill. Couple of questions, Charif, for you on EMEA. So can you provide more color on the type of competitors competing on price, feature, or functions in EMEA, you know, SaaS companies or large ERP software companies? Yeah. First of all, I mean, we've seen and I think we mentioned a couple of months ago that we saw some softness in EMEA overall. We see the impact between what's happening in Russia, Ukraine, and in the Middle East as well as having economic, well you know, softness well in EMEA, and that's affecting the overall market. We did mention that a couple of months ago. Well, the competition we saw is coming from the largest, the larger players, the like the players that have a combination of backup security and other solutions. Because of the weakness of the economy and the weakness of demand, we're seeing MSPs sometimes, occasionally, of course, not all the time, as you see, the churn is still within respectable percentages, deciding to go for the cheapest solution or the cheapest offer, because of that economic pressure that they are facing. Now, as I said, we need to do a better job in presenting the value and interacting directly with MSPs that have a quote-unquote "indirect relationship." Indirect relationship means that they go through distributors distributing partners, and meaning that we don't bill them on a monthly basis. We have one total bill from the wholesaler that covers all the MSPs under management. Now, that said, we continue having a premium positioning in the market, and we continue to sell 25%-30% higher than the competition. We intend to keep it this way because what we offer in terms of capabilities, features, and utility for the MSPs and the end client continues to be, in the SMB space specifically, unparalleled. Thanks, Charif. Next question. There's a couple on M&A, and there was one particular sarcastic one, which the questionnaire kind of admitted to. But I think probably it's a broad kind of conversation around M&A. So can you please elaborate on progress on M&A? Yes. Or general activity on your side with respect to this strategic workstream? Yeah. Absolutely. And I do appreciate the sarcasm and, you know, I'm as I told you earlier, Adrian, I'm happy to take any question. Sure. So the M&A is something that we continue working on. At the same time, you have to keep in mind a couple of things. We are not desperate to do M&A. We still have a lot of good things happening on the organic business. So we're being picky and choosy, and we're looking for high-conviction M&As. And as a case in point, I don't want to. I just don't want to stay generic. I'm going to give a couple of examples. We did sift through many companies in the March quarter. And I can highlight two examples of where we went further than just, you know, sifting through and having earlier conversations. We had two companies that we looked at very seriously and multiple conversations. You know, we call it pre-due diligence, right, PDD. One was a security company that really fit really well with our offering, and around Office 365 backup and archiving, but the valuation expectation mismatch was so huge that we decided to walk away, okay? So you're talking about smaller MRR and very, very high expected valuation. The other one is a company in the backup space where while the valuation was a bit more palatable, once we dug deep into, you know, 2 or 3 conversations with the CTO and the team, we realized that the product capabilities are quite shallow, and the skill set and the talent they had specifically on the engineering and product side was also quite weak. So we passed, and we decided to move on. The other thing I want everybody on the call to know is there are oscillations in the market. So today, private company valuation is richer than public company valuations. A few years back, it was the other way around. And that is one of our headwinds today, is that there is a mismatch between expectations of public companies like ourselves versus companies who are in the data protection space and private who are being funded by VCs, or other investors at a higher valuations. Eventually, with all the good and hard work the team is doing, something will pan out. But it has to be logical across multiple dimensions, logical in terms of the fit and the quality of the product and the team and the go-to-market and the ARR, and it has to be logical from a valuation standpoint. So we're going to stand our ground. We're going to continue being logical and guarded on how we do M&A, because it has to be high conviction. The organic business is good, and M&A is a disruptive type of activity. We have to integrate the products. We have to integrate the team to it better be high conviction. Thanks, Charif. You're very, very clear. Next question. Is there any timeline on a shift to private cloud? Yeah. I mean, the name of the game is to continue finding ways to maintain and over the mid and long term improve our gross margins. We, without giving any time frames, believe that the answer is not cloud-only, not on-prem, not on-premise-only. The future is hybrid. So we already have some of our customers are on an on-premise solution in Europe, in Germany. We also continue to use, predominantly Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud to a much lesser extent, so far. And then this is the position that we're going to have. We're going to have a hybrid type of arrangement with the name of the game being sustaining and improving gross margins over the mid and long term. Thanks, Charif. It's quite a cheeky question to ask, but I'll ask it anyway. So why why not aim to demonstrate at least some profit growth in order to ensure the company is building its reputation as a profitable company? Yeah. I want to remind the attendees that Dropsuite was profitable before profitable was in fashion. We were profitable in the end of 2021 when every single SaaS company, almost without exception, was burning a lot of cash. So I would ask the shareholders and the investors to keep that in mind. Like, we have been, I think, really good custodians of shareholder money, and we've been very careful of how we make our investments. And we see the opportunity cost of holding back on reinvesting while we have a lot of tailwinds behind our backs will do us and our shareholders a disservice in the medium and long term. So, for example, adding a little bit of profitability just to make a point, which we can do anytime, any day when we decide to, is not going to be for the best interest of our company and our shareholders in the medium and long term. Hence our decision to stick to being in an acceptable range that doesn't demonstrate profitability but doesn't show that we need to grow it now while knowing full well that when you look at larger companies, SaaS companies, software companies selling to the MSP space, and the attendees can look at companies like N-able, which is on the New York Stock Exchange, or Datto, which was on the New York Stock Exchange before it was acquired, you can look at very healthy BITDA margins of north of 20% at scale. Thanks, Charif. That answer got two thumbs up. So well done. Okay. Thank you. Final question for this session, and we can wrap up now. So, how are your new products such as Archive and QuickBooks going in gaining market share? Yeah. Yeah. So, Archiving has been around for a while, and I'm pleased to say that Archiving, so let me explain a little bit. So backup is a product like an insurance policy, right? So when you lose data, you can use backup to recover your data, and that's what backup is. Archiving and Compliance is a product that not only helps you protect your data in case of data loss, but it also helps you in case you have a lawsuit, or you have a problem with one of your employees, and you need a lawyer or a compliance officer to investigate and sift through a lot of data and emails and files to determine what happened in the past. Dropsuite's unique position, proposition is that we combine these two products into one, and that has continued to resonate. I'm pleased to say that archiving product, which combines backup and archiving, now far exceeds from a revenue standpoint that of backup only. That's why that's one of the reasons why you see ARPU growing over time. So that's going well. It's been there for a while, and we're very happy with where we are. We see more areas for improvement, and more product introductions or feature introductions for a good, better, best type of strategy. Now, our newer products are I would say Google Workspace is still newish, not new-newish, and that is tracking really well and growing at a faster pace than our core business. So we're satisfied, and we still see more areas to grow the Google Workspace business. The second one that we launched was QuickBooks Online Backup, which is accounting software backup. We did fall on our sword in January and say, unfortunately, the owner of that company called Intuit, which is one of the big SaaS companies, listed on NASDAQ, they decided to walk away from the MSP market after they announced that MSP market's going to be one of the five big bets. We still have a few hundreds we have, and we're seeing some growth of hundreds of licenses on QuickBooks, but not material enough to expect anything major to come from that. And now, it's profitable. It's growing, but the numbers will not be material for us in the medium and long term. But we're going to keep the product, and there have some several MSPs were extremely happy and continue to add licenses as we speak. Lastly, GovCloud, Government Cloud. GovCloud is a product that's built in the United States, can only be managed in the United States that caters to the U.S. government and all its agencies and the state and local government. That is starting to see some traction. We're not going to split the products, you know, by revenue for each one, but I can tell you that we've seen a very strong, albeit from a small base, a strong uptick in demand and in ARR in Q1, and we expect this to continue throughout the year. These are the products that we have. We did mention that we expect a new product to be launched in the second half of 2024 as well. Thank you, Charif, for exhausting the group. Let me hand back to you now for any closing remarks. Well, thank you, Adrian. I want to thank everyone here joining us, our shareholders, our employees. I think we still have a lot of things to accomplish in the foreseeable future, and I do look forward to updating you in the coming quarters. Thank you, everyone.
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