Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call of Exasol AG following the publication of the preliminary financial year figures of 2024. I am delighted to welcome CEO Joerg Tewes and CFO Jan-Dirk Henrich. The gentlemen will speak shortly and guide us through the presentation and the results, and afterwards we will have our Q&A session so that you have the opportunity to ask your questions if you may have. Having said this, Mr. Tewes, the stage is yours. Thank you, Sarah. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining us for our quarterly call, investor call, where we provide the updates on the preliminary 2024 figures as well as an outlook on our current business and how we expect the year 2025 to shape. Today I'm here, I'm Joerg Tewes, the CEO of Exasol, and with me is my colleague, Jan-Dirk Henrich, who's our Chief Financial Officer. Here's our disclaimer. Please read through it at your own convenience. Next slide. Let me talk about 2024. This has been the second year that I've been CEO of Exasol. I, as most of you know, I joined at the beginning of 2023. Our number one goal was to get the company back on solid ground and achieve sustainable profitability on our path going forward. We're very happy that we are actually achieved that goal. The key milestone in 2024 that we communicated to the capital market at the beginning of last year is that we wanted to be profitable in EBIT EBITDA for the year 2024. We achieved that goal. We actually came in with an EBITDA of EUR 2 million. That was over what we initially thought. That's a really good outcome. Not only did we achieve a EUR 2 million ARR, we also had a positive net income and cash flow as well. The company has come out of the loss-making territory through the years 2021, 2022, 2023. We're also committed, and we will confirm today, that we remain this journey and continue to drive a profitable growth for the company. That's our check mark on the first accomplishment. The other data that we have, the other key data points is our overall ARR. We ended the year with a total of EUR 42.3 million, which is an overall growth of 4% year-over-year in comparison to 2023. This is something that we also guided to the market, where we said at the beginning of the year that we would achieve a single-digit growth year-over-year. We continue to look at the business and push a growth obviously in conjunction with the profitability aspect. Our total revenue grew 13% year-over-year. We ended the year with EUR 39.6 million in revenue. Due to the profitability and the positive cash flow, we actually increased our cash balance to EUR 15 million end of period, end of 2024. We have undergone significant efforts to sharpen our strategic thinking and positioning. I'll walk you through more details on the following slide. We have a clear focus and we're doubling down on the things that have been working well for us, specifically around on-premise and hybrid verticals in which customers are using us today. That's in the verticals of finance or financial services, banks, insurance companies, as well as healthcare. We have in those verticals, we're actually seeing a strong growth momentum in 90%, with 90% year-over-year growth. We were able to sign 10 new customers with a total value of EUR 700,000 in those focused verticals. We have been able to do over EUR 5 million of upselling, which includes one significant deal with a major financial institution here in Germany, at a total contract value of larger than EUR 10 million, and a five-year ARR commitment. We do have or we're seeing a higher churn rate in non-focused verticals, which impacts the overall net ARR performance. While we're seeing the growth in the focused verticals, we're also seeing some decline of flatness in the non-focused verticals. The execution of or the financial and strategic execution in 2024 also gives us the foundation to re-accelerate our ARR growth in the years after 2025. Basically, what we're going through right now is a phase of shifting focus, and that will pay off on a going forward basis. Next slide, JD. We've as part of our outreach, I think it's important, dear investors, to also that you see how we're presenting the company to customers and prospects. We're sharpening the who are we, what is Exasol. Let me quickly read that to you. Exasol is the world's most powerful analytics engine, purpose-built to handle the most demanding data workloads at an unmatched price-performance ratio. What's important to note in here is that we are focusing on the term engine. We're really helping customers on several key use cases to solve their needs in the analytics space. Next slide. What are the challenges in today's data architectures? We separated that into three major buckets. First and foremost, cost is always a key challenge for any enterprise. Compute cost in the data analytics field is a significant challenge, so the exploding computing costs for customers or companies that are and have migrated to the cloud. Typically in the cloud, there are pay-as-you-go or consumption-based pricing models, which is very convenient when there's initially when people start a process. Over time, as more data, more users get onboarded to a solution, these costs can get really high. We've heard from a lot of existing, but also from prospects that the cost going through the roof, and that this is a major challenge pain point for customers. The other important area is regulatory and compliance requests. The cloud, as it stands, is an open field, and customers who have tight regulatory requirements would still wanna maintain control over that in their own data center. Keep their data on-premise in their own data center. This actually, with a lot of the uncertainty that's going on in this world right now, it's also a trend that we're specifically seeing actually here in Europe, in Central Europe. It actually plays into certain companies or customers looking for a solution that they can control better, where data doesn't go into cloud systems. Last but not least, it's the in-time delivery of the right data to the business. It's not just pure performance. It's making sure that multiple data sources in large enterprise get combined and that insights that are being generated out of these data sources are being delivered to the end user in the enterprise in time. A high frequency of timely data updates, that's a key requirement that many enterprises have today. Let's move over. What are we doing, and how are we helping customers? These are the four key use cases for our Exasol analytics engine. First of all, you remember that we've talked about this in previous conversation as well, is when there is the need to boost analytics and AI workloads in an existing stack. We had the Espresso campaign that basically exactly spoke to this acceleration use case. Exasol analytics engine is really good in helping customers to accelerate their existing data analytics workspace. That's the first part. The second part is modernization. A lot of companies have been using data analytics, data warehouses for 10, 15, 20 years. Systems like Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Db2, Teradata, these systems have been in place for a long time. Each technology at a certain point comes to a point where companies and customers think about modernizing that infrastructure. Our use case is for those customers who are working on modernizing their existing data stack but are not going full native to the cloud. That's where we come into play. That's where we have a place in the overall data analytics workspace. Optimizing. See the coins there. The cost factor for every enterprise is a big deal. As I said on my previous slide, one of the key challenges that companies have is exploding costs in the cloud. There's a trend that actually started in the U.S. last year. It's called repatriation. We also see this more and more in Europe, which means that customers are considering moving back certain workloads from the cloud to an on-premise solution. They might not just move They might not move everything back, some companies are handpicking select workloads and doing them on-premise again. This trend we're gonna see continue because cost is gonna become over time, an even bigger factor. One of the key use cases for us where we come into play that we help customers on their journey, on their repatriation journey, to basically save costs. The last one, also very important is the secure and running workloads AI and data analytics workloads in a truly secure environment that customers can control directly, specifically all the new AI use cases that enterprises are working on right now. There's a lot of fear and concern that proprietary data, confidential information is leaking out to the outside world. Again, one of the key use cases where we are helping customers is to run these AI, ML workloads in a secure environment. Next slide. Let's talk more about our sharpened customer focus. What we're doing and what we started in 2024 and what we're now in the process of implementing as our key strategy is a focus on a certain type of customer. We've sharpened and narrowed our ICP, so our ideal customer profile. What you see here is who is that customer. That customers are on-premise and hybrid customers in industries with a strong regulatory influence, driving near term, our near-term growth potential. Which industries are that? It's banks, it's healthcare. Those industries have a very high regulatory influence, and to a certain degree, slightly lesser, also telecom, utilities, and public sector. We have two segments. There's the group of customers that clearly goes on-premises first. All they do is run their data analytics in their own data center. That's our sweet spot. We're also serving customers who have a hybrid-first approach. Hybrid in this case means that they're using both on-premise as well as cloud solutions together. Some data stays in their own data center, some data goes to the cloud. And this is either being separated by internal use cases or, as I just explained, customers do that because they're saving costs for some expensive workloads, they keep on premise. Other workloads, they're moving to the cloud. We offer our customers both options, they can run our analytics engine on-premise. They can run it in the cloud. The hybrid first is the secondary segment that we're going after. On the regions, we clearly see a lot of demand and a lot in the DACH region, so in the German-speaking countries, but also Nordics, U.K., and Ireland. In 2024, we also started in Middle East. Middle East is actually specifically when it comes to the on-premise segment, very interesting for us. There's also the U.S. market that has both the requirements coming from specifically healthcare. We have a couple of customers in the healthcare space in the U.S. and also the financial services space. That is a sharpened focus that we've undergone through. In the past, we haven't really pushed ourselves to that strong focus on customer lens. Our active marketing and sales activities that we're currently driving as an organization is geared towards that ICP, that target customer with very specific metrics and targets. I think maybe to say a few more words on how we're doing that, we're basically going there where those prospects are. It is events. It's outbound marketing that we're doing to specific verticals. That also means that we're not doing, let's say, the infamous shotgun approach. We're not trying to win business in all different areas. We're really focused as an organization, as a commercial organization, and as a product organization to go after that specific customers. Next slide. One question we often get, "Okay, how big is that market, and are you gonna be able to actually generate enough growth for the company on a going-forward basis by narrowing our focus?" That's, I think, and I think what you see here on this chart is a view on Where is the market and how is this particular market developing. This data is only the on-premise market. As I just explained, there's also an additional hybrid element of it. If we just stick to the on-prem market, what you see on the left side, the overall global market for on-premise is $17 billion. In the regions that we're operating, it's EUR 11 billion, and we believe that there's an obtainable market. Customers that are in their journey switching to a more modern data analytic solution is roughly $3 billion. That's the overall obtainable market for us. You see on the right side, we have a prediction that the market keeps on growing. It doesn't grow in double-digit, but it grows in a meaningful way. 2.7% CAGR which lets the market grow into 3.2%. We believe we are in a growth market. We are also replacing certain solutions in that specific market segment. For us, we're currently at EUR 42 million or EUR 40 million ARR. There's enough growth for us in that space. That's I think the message of this slide, that through proper execution and focused execution, we have enough runway to ultimately, which is our goal, to bring back the company to double-digit growth. Next slide. This is a view of our business that I think should help you to understand what's working well and how are we transitioning the current business. What you see here is. If you just look at the percentages for now, we've kind of separated our business in focused verticals, which is the aforementioned financial services, healthcare, public sector, versus the non-focused vertical. The non-focused verticals are the ones that are retail and e-commerce type. Some of these were verticals for the reasons I described will remain in the segment that we're good at, which is on-prem and hybrid, but others have the opportunity to go cloud native. That's an area where we are most likely not gonna win business. What you see here is this trend. In that focused vertical business, we have actually very healthy business numbers. We have a gross upsell rate, 130%. We have a single-digit churn rate, 6%. We have net revenue retention of 125%, and we have a CAGR of 27% over the past three years. That's good. When you look at the one below, you see that this is actually dragging down our overall numbers, and the result is something that is basically the mix of it. This is a process. In 2025, we will continue this process. We expect that by the end of the year, this ratio is probably gonna be a 70%/30% ratio. We are going through a transformation process, and the future growth of the company will be on us, focusing on the dark blue bar, so the focus verticals, on a going-forward basis. Next slide, JD. This is another view of what happened in 2024. We kind of split this between new customer and up and cross-selling. Basically, a business that we're doing with existing customers. Let me talk about the new customer acquisition first. Again, we doubled in our in our focus verticals, most of them actually come from the banking insurance space. We really got some nice traction there. We have several six-digit initial deal value acquisitions in that space. In the up and cross-selling, we had 44 and 43 customers upselling, existing customers who basically increased their spending with us. The total numbers basically stayed flat in 2023 and 2024. Out of these customers, we generated an incremental ARR of EUR 5.6 million in 2024. This includes one the one large deal that I already mentioned, where we had a significant upsell with one of the largest German regional banks. Next slide. All right, I hand over to JD, and I think I will come back at the end of the presentation. JD, you're on mute. My apologies. Thanks, Sarah. I'm very happy to talk to you today. Let me run you through the numbers of 2024 in a little bit more detail, also specifically building on some of the things that Joerg pointed out with respect to the strategic focus that we've given our business and how that translates into the numbers that you're seeing both in 2024 and also what we're expecting for 2025. I usually start my section with talking about top line. Let me twist it around a little bit this time, actually start with the bottom line, because as Joerg mentioned in the beginning of the presentation, we've achieved a very important milestone last year. 2024 marked the completion of a very long and also very burdensome journey back to profitability. We've achieved EUR 2 million of EBITDA last year, and have also been able to be profitable in each quarter last year, bringing this journey of almost more than EUR 30 million negative EBITDA in 2021 total to a successful conclusion and setting us up for a good journey moving forward. This obviously also translated into a positive change in liquid funds. Now, technically speaking, we already had that in 2023, but back then, this was only due to the fact that, as many of you recall, we conducted a capital measure in the first half of 2023. 2024 was the first time as well that we genuinely generated positive cash flow from our operations, further aided by a stronger interest income, as I will comment later on a little bit. This was an important conclusion of the journey, and as I'll later talk about, we also plan to continue that journey and further build on our profitability while fully focusing on reigniting growth and getting back to a double-digit net growth as well. These changes translated themselves all the way down to net income as well. This is our P&L view. As you can see at the very bottom right-hand side, we did not only generate positive EBITDA and cash flow last year, but also a positive net income, which improved significantly by EUR 8.5 million to +EUR 0.3 million. This even stronger improvement compared to the EBITDA improvement was helped along by a continued decline in depreciation and amortization. As many of you recall, we are not capitalizing R&D expenses anymore, so the legacy capitalizations are gradually written off and the depreciations are decreasing. At the same time, we also had a stronger interest income in 2024 by roughly EUR 400,000 because we did not burn cash anymore and were therefore able to also invest that cash with a little bit more longer terms and generate higher interest income. We were profitable on both EBITDA, net income and cash flow level. If we look at how this was generated, you can see that it was a combination of further improved top line. You can see that our recurring revenues in the P&L increased by almost EUR 5 million, which was heavily driven as well by the strong business signings that we had at the end of 2023, which then became P&L effective in 2024, driving a revenue growth that succeeded our net ARR growth last year, and as a consequent, also improving net gross profit significantly. At the same time, you can see that we further streamlined our cost base. Total cost now in terms of OpEx was at roughly EUR 38 million compared to almost EUR 41 million in 2023, so that's a EUR 3 million improvement. As well, this concludes a long series of efficiency measures that we implemented over the past three years, and that we genuinely also concluded with the end of last year. We feel that the organization as it is in place right now sets us up well for our plans. As you'll, you will see that our cost base will largely remain flat in 2025, and the efficiency measures that we've implemented actually allow us to start selectively reinvesting in important topics, most importantly in R&D and product, where we want to stay competitive and make sure we invest in fields like AI, and also a further improvement of our core product. The efficiency measures put us in a position to be able to do that without increasing the total cost base next year in any way. This kind of concludes my start on the bottom line. Let's reorient ourselves back to the top line because with this achievement of solid profitability which is here to stay, we can fully concentrate our minds on reigniting growth and co-completing the transition journey that Joerg talked about. Let me start with our classical quarter-by-quarter view on ARR. I've talked a lot about the seasonality in our business in the past, and it has materialized itself again last year. The ARR decline in the first half of the year is what we anticipated in our guidance at the beginning of the year. Our contracts with customers typically are fiscal year bound, so if any churn happens, it typically kicks in in the beginning of the year because contracts drop out of the portfolio, whereas new contracts are signed towards the end of the year in Q3 and Q4, and this is exactly the kind of dynamic that you see unfolding here. The larger churn in Q2 was actually a bigger customer in the U.K. that we expected to churn and that hit us there. In the second half of the year, net growth returned significantly driven by the focus verticals that Joerg has talked about and in Q4 in particular as well, with the big deal that was concluded in the finance sector. If we look at this a little bit more in terms of our classical subscription metrics, it illustrates very well what I just talked about. You can see that in total, on the left-hand side, we generated EUR 7.6 million of gross new business last year. If you recall the numbers that Joerg showed with you, showed you, of how much growth we generated in the focus verticals, and if you translate that into these numbers, it means that 70% of our new customer growth was driven by the focus verticals, and 85% of our upselling performance was driven by the focus verticals, which really goes to show kind of where the strengths lie, and what works really well and what we want to build on. Whereas the downselling and the lost customers are concentrated in the non-focus verticals. I will talk about this portfolio shift a little bit more in a minute. On a net basis, however, if you look at the upsell rates, in total we had a net revenue retention of roughly 100%, so the upselling performance in the focus verticals was kind of eaten up by the churn and downselling in the non-focus verticals and the net growth was generated by new customers in the focus verticals. We also had an increased average ARR churn rate of roughly 15% driven by the non-focus verticals. You heard Joerg talk a little bit about the sweet spots of our customers or the types of ideal customer profiles, and that they are very strongly concentrated in EMEA as well. He also talked about that there's a huge market with those in the U.S. I think if you look at the regional performance of ARR last year, you can see that growth was basically driven by EMEA, which is not a surprise because we have a bigger established base in these photo-focused verticals in that region as well. North America developed flat last year, which is largely because the team was not yet as fully focused on this new strategic focus that we laid out and is only now starting to reorient its pipeline efforts in that direction. The market is there, as Joerg talked about. In fact, the on-prem and hybrid market in the U.S. is estimated to be almost twice as big as in Europe. But it needs a very targeted approach, especially obviously because our, the relationship between our team size and total market size in the U.S., is even starker than in EMEA. We've defined a very specific initiative for North America for this year. We do plan to get back to net growth in North America in 2025. For example, one key initiative focuses on going after algorithmic trading houses or quantitative traders in the big financial centers on the East Coast. We have two flagship clients in that field, or established clients in that field, and it's a very interesting customer profile because those companies are very protective of their data. They're very protective of their algorithms. They often run their own on-premise technology stacks, and it's a sales initiative that we've defined for ourselves to reignite that growth in North America. If we continue the perspective that Joerg already started sharing with you and thinking about our growth, separately for the focus verticals in our journey there and the non-focus verticals, you can see here that in 2024 we generated almost 20% growth in the focus verticals, whereas the non-focus verticals had a net decline of 12%. What you can also see if you look at the development over the years is that this shift from the focus to non-focus verticals in our portfolio has accelerated over the years. By end of last year, we were already in a position where almost 60% of our business was related to the focus verticals. For 2025, we expect to continue on this path. For the focus verticals, we again, plan for strong double-digit growth, whereas we do see continued decline in the non-focus verticals, particularly because, legacy customers in the retail space tend to migrate gradually into native cloud environments because it better suits their purpose. On a net basis, With that we again, plan with mid-single digit growth for next year based on this combination. But based on this dynamic, we expect that the focus verticals by the end of this year will already have a weight of 70% in our overall portfolio, which also means that gradually in the midterm, the strong and healthy fundamentals and dynamics in the focus verticals will start to translate into accelerated net growth on group level as well. That basically leads me straight over to our general perspective for 2025, where, as mentioned for ARR, but also for revenue, we expect mid-single digit growth again for this year. Whereas on EBITDA terms and profitability, we want to improve by at least 50% from the EUR 2 million that we achieved in 2024, so a range of EUR 3 million-EUR 4 million in 2025. Sets us up both in terms of portfolio structure at the end of the year and profitability to return to profitable double-digit growth in the years after 2025, with continued healthy performance in our strategic focus field. With that, I would conclude my summary of the financials and hand over back to Joerg to talk a little bit about the midterm perspectives of our product and summarize the key takeaways. Thanks, JD. I also wanted to take a minute to walk you through, besides what we, the pure financial performance, where are we currently moving and driving innovation for the company. Remember, our heritage is really, it stems from maximal speed through our unique in-memory architecture, the scalability through our massive parallel processing architecture, and our ability to deploy our product, our engine on-premise in the clouds and SaaS environments. One thing that's really important for a lot of customers is the minimal administration. Our product, our core product is self-tuning. It has auto-indexing features. That's basically what we have. That's the core, that's the engine that Exasol has been basically building over the last 20 years. Where are we going? I've shared in several occasions that AI is gonna become a key factor for all customers, but also specifically for the customers that we are targeting and focusing our activities. Even in the most regulated and most conservative environment, companies are currently working on bringing in AI into their overall data analytics world. We're responding to that. We are working on our product roadmap that we're sharing with prospects that we share to the market that is adding more AI capabilities to our core product. We're not building LLM by ourselves, don't worry, we're not gonna invest EUR 500 million in training complex LLMs. However, we're extending our core engine so that customers can run AI workloads as close as possible to the database. We're gonna bring that into the database so they can combine the benefits of the new modern AI methods with their corporate data that sits in their data center in an Exasol database. We will have GPU support for running user-defined functions in Exasol this year. This is gonna be a very exciting feature that will come to the market later this year. We're also helping customers on some key use cases. This is a high-level presentation of our roadmap. I should also mention that we are going to have an Exasol Xperience event in May this year, in which we then will talk to the broader market about details on our product roadmap. Next slide, JD. Key takeaways, I think we talked about this, first time after the IPO, we generated profitability. Strategy on focus on core customer groups is paying off. We continue our profitable path throughout 2025, with the target of growing at least by 50% to EUR 3 million-EUR 4 million EBITDA. We're aiming to get back to double-digit growth once we're kind of completed that transition away from the non-focused verticals into focused verticals. JD, if there's anything to add other than. Otherwise, I would end our presentation and open up the floor for any questions. Thank you. Thank you so much for your presentation and the dive into your results. We will now move over to the Q&A session. If you would like to speak directly to Mr. Tewes and Mr. Henrich, just raise up your virtual hand, or if you've dialed in by phone you can do this by pressing star key nine followed by star key six, and you also have the opportunity to place your questions in our chat box. We already received the first question from Robert-Jan van der Horst. You should be able to speak now. Yeah. Can you hear me all right? Yes. Yes, Robert. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Only one more or less housekeeping one. You mentioned that you want to increase R&D costs on the one hand, but also that the cost base as a whole should be rather flat in 2025. Yeah I was thinking, you know, are there costs shifting around? Maybe related to that also, saw on the slide, with the P&L more details, that you had some asterisks, mentioning EUR 0.7 million in restructuring cost last year. Do you expect that to kind of disappear in the current year, or are there still ongoing measures? Maybe starting with the last, with the last question first. No, I think we've completed our journey in terms of measures. Yeah. I mean, we always keep a small amount of budget for severance in any budget. But this is mostly then, let's say, performance related changes, but not position reductions. But in terms of putting the organization into the shape that we want it to be, we completed our journey largely, by end of last year. What's happening is, because we implemented those measures in the course of the year, the full year impacts of those measures will only translate themselves into next year. We are reinvesting some of those savings into strengthening the core strategic focus areas that I mentioned, and the net result as it unfolds in the P&L then is basically a relatively flat total cost position. If you were to look at the composition of that cost base in 2024 versus then 2025, when it's finished, you will see that G&A and sales and marketing are on a little bit of a lower level compared to 202 4, whereas engineering and product are on a little bit of a higher level, but it's not gonna be major shifts. Okay. Perfect. Understood. A follow-up question: I mean, due to seasonality, right? Mmm-Hmm. Our growth will be mostly in Q4. It's quite, you know, a long time till we will, you know, see where on the mid-single digit you land. In general, looking at how the market development, how budgets for these kinds of investments develop, do you see any changes, any idea that maybe 2025 will be even better than the 19% growth we saw on this focused verticals last year? Is it still muted or more or less on the same level than last year? Just, you know, to give us your gut feeling about how the focus markets are looking right now. I would say, I would start with the comment that in the discussions that we're having with customers, I would say a macroeconomically induced hesitation to invest is not something that we see systematically. Yeah. I think on the topics that we're talking to customers, they keep investing into their data stacks, they keep investing in, you know, getting into shape for the analytics world of the future. I would say general hesitation on IT investments from a macro or market sentiment perspective, I don't see. Joerg, man, feel free to chime in, but that's not a factor that is dominating our internal reviews when we talk about our top line initiatives. There's definitely a push to modernize tech stacks in the focus verticals. It's an ongoing process. There's many outdated systems there. I would say the potential for us to convert more market to us in the focus verticals is definitely given, and this is what we're banking on, and we're obviously aiming to hit and/or surpass the 19% that we achieved last year. At the same time, the same level of modernization of tech stacks is going on in the non-focus verticals as well, which is kind of driving this continuous shift to native cloud solutions in the parts of that world. That in sum leads to the accelerated shift in weights in the portfolio that I outlined to you. Okay. That makes total sense. The opportunities are definitely there for us to grow in the focus verticals. Okay. Perfect. Thank you very much, guys. That was very helpful. I'll go back to the queue. Thanks, Robert. Thank you, Robert. Thanks. I think we had a question from Philipp [Viulong] in the chat. Should I take this? Okay. Yeah. The first question is. Let me just read it. I'm not sure if everybody has access to it. At end of January, you announced that you hired a CRO and a CMO. Could you tell us about their roles and tasks, and maybe about your strategy collaborate with sales partners? First part of the question, CRO, we actually didn't hire. The person is Henrik Jorgensen, who actually has been with us since December 2023. He's been with Exasol for well over a year. What we actually did in 2024, we streamlined our sales organization. Previously, we had. We hired Henrik originally as the leader for Europe. In parallel, we had a sales leader for North America as well. During 2024, we made the decision to part ways with the North American sales leader, and basically assign that territory also to Henrik. In the process, just to clarify that role, we basically gave him the global sales responsibility. He actually wasn't a new hire. We actually saved costs by parting ways with our actually very expensive North American sales leader. It had a positive effect on the cost side, but it also helps us streamline our go-to-market activities across the region. One thing that we actually identified, we had slightly different approaches in Europe and North America. With having a single-threaded leader now responsible for all of sales across the globe, we have clearly a clear ownership. That's the CRO. That's why we made this move. On the CMO side, we did have a marketing leader in the past, someone who was with us, and who actually left the company back in I believe April last year. We were working on a replacement and Lars Milde, who joined us in November, is basically filling that void. From a cost perspective, we're basically, I think sharpened our focus. They both have strong backgrounds in the data analytics field. Henrik's been the lead in Central Europe for Tableau for a decade. Lars actually also worked at Tableau. Most recently, he was at One Data, which is also a company in the data analytics space. They're both experts in the field that we're in. They are actually helping us specifically on the implementation of the strategy that we outlined, the focus on key verticals, and the implementation throughout the commercial organization. The last part is sales partner. We have some strong partnerships. We have a really good partner in Austria that actually helps us there to drive new business. That's certainly an area where we are pushing harder. As part of Henrik's role is to also extend the partner business for Exasol. All right. Thank you so much. Let's move on with Lukas Spang. He would like to speak directly. Yes. Hi, good afternoon to both of you. Hi, Lukas. I would take my questions one by one if that's okay. I would like to start with the ARR development in 2025. Can you please guide us a little bit more in detail about how you think about the ARR development and the special seasonality in 2025? Is this, let's say, more similar to the 2024 seasonality and development, or should we more think in more pronounced ways in terms of weaker H1 and more pronounced in the upper side in the second half? Do you want me to answer that first? Yeah We jump to the next question? Yeah. Okay. I think in terms of the way it's gonna play out, it's going to be similar pattern-wise to 2024. We expect a declining ARR in the first half of the year. To which extent and whether it's gonna be stronger compared to 2024, it depends on the new business closings that we can achieve in Q1 and Q2 at which at this stage, we can't fully predict yet. Let's say pipeline-wise, in terms of potential, we have potential to structure it in a way that it looks similar to last year. It could also be that it looks slightly more pronounced than last year, because there's one larger retail customer shifting away from us to a native cloud solution. Yeah, but we're also at the same time discussing new potential revenue streams with that customer. The level of pronunciation that you're going to see at this stage I can't predict. It will definitely, we will definitely see a declining ARR in the first half, followed by a growth in the second half. Can you give us a rough indication of the large customers you will lose in the H1? I mean, one is our, is a large retail customer, in the EMEA region. Mm-hmm. That's a seven-digit value ARR that's moving away from us. It's been a very big customer with us in the past. As I said, the level to which it's gonna be on a net-net basis, also depends on outcomes of discussions we have with them on building alternative revenue streams with them. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's definitely, a seven-digit ARR customer moving away from us gradually. Yeah. Okay. on the employee base, what is? Mm-hmm expectation for 2025, and what was the number for end of 2024? End of 2024 we were 180 people. Roughly in the budget we're planning with around 170. But that doesn't mean that we're going to part ways with 10 colleagues in the course of 2025. This was because a number of efficiency measures that we implemented in 2024 were still on the books. The measures are all basically implemented. On average, we're calculating with between 165 and 170 FTE for 2024, 2025, I'm sorry. Okay. Then on product side, last year in our discussions there was also the product Yotilla. Mm-hmm. Is there any update from your side? Yotilla was actually one of the products that we decided in the context of the strategic focus that we implemented to shift away from. As you recall, Yotilla was a technology that the company acquired, I think, five years ago, and was trying to develop and implement it and commercialize it. I think one thing we learned in the context of our strategic thoughts is that the synergetic value of that product with the core offering that makes us strong and that makes us grow in the focus verticals is not significant. At the same time, fully commercializing that product would basically mean investing in a full-scale separate business line, which we decided not to do moving forward. We decided to shift also the development resources on that product to the core focus fields, which is part of the shifts in costs that I outlined also, as an answer to Robert's question. JD, look, I think we have one more question maybe from Johannes [Rees]. I think we're at time, so maybe we take this one more question, and then we'll conclude the call. Mm-hmm. Okay, thanks. All right, thanks. Johannes. Let's move on with Johannes [Rees]. Hey, good afternoon. Maybe one or two questions. The first on the, again, on the topic of partnerships. In the past you also partnered with analytic partners like Tableau. Any update to this? Do you still work closely with Tableau? In the partnership strategy you mentioned you want to get stronger. How much is also the focus to find partners which are strong in your verticals like banking, IT service companies who are focused on the banking area like GFT, for example, huh. Yeah. Good question. I think we actually engaging with GFT. Thanks for bringing that up. Because you're absolutely right. That makes sense. They are strongly focused on financial services. As part of the strategy for us to be successful in that space is to also work with the right partners, specifically companies. We actually looked at joint customers. We identified quite a few, but then there's also some of our customers that they are not in, and vice versa. That actually is a good example where a focus strategy actually helps us also to select the right partners. We're doing that specifically to answer that question. Mm-hmm. I think, yes, doing more on the partner side is something that we're actively pushing on. I mentioned earlier that we have the Exasol Xperience in early May in Berlin. The partner participation for that experience is actually very crucial. We have several key partners that have already committed to be there and talk together with us to our, to the in the participants which are both existing customers as well as, well, potential customers. Yes. The second question regarding the non-focus areas, how much they will come down maybe even in the years after, and how much maybe the pressure has increased or maybe some acceleration of the move to the cloud by an offering like SAP Data Cloud, which was announced a week ago or so, man. Yeah. I think, well, it, again, it's, it's I think different by vertical. I think there's some verticals that are moving to the cloud much faster, much more aggressively than others. You're not gonna see major German banks moving to the cloud. Yeah. You will certainly see let's say players in the e-commerce field moving. If they haven't already moved to the cloud, accelerate that move. I think that why I think it's important that we look at the ICP, and it also means when you have an ICP, an ideal customer, whoever doesn't fit in there, at least we shouldn't go actively after that because we're most likely not gonna win. I mean, that's one of the lessons. Mm-hmm Over the past year or past two years. That's why we're focusing our organization. To non-strategic verticals will further decrease after 2025, yes? Most likely. Yeah. That's I think that's what we showed. We had this. I think what we showed on JD's slide was the 70/30 split. Mm-hmm. That will continue. It's really hard to predict what 2026 will be. Maybe it's gonna be 80/20 or something along these lines. We haven't. We'll see. Okay. Thanks a lot. Yeah. Thanks, Johannes. Thanks, Johannes. I would say we conclude this call. Sarah? Yes, for sure. We are, I guess, a bit over the time, but with this, thank you everyone for joining and your shown interest. Have a safe and healthy rest of the week, and we say goodbye. Thank you.