Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Efecte's Q2 2023 results webcast. My name is Lari Nikkanen, and with me today are our CEO, Niilo Fredrikson, and our CPO, Santeri Jussila. During this results webcast, we will be making some forward-looking statements. We encourage all participants and investors to review the disclaimer from our presentation materials. As for today's agenda, we have 1 full hour for this webcast. We'll start with our CEO, Niilo, presenting our Q2 and H1 results. After the presentation, we will have the remaining time for our Q&A session. Please present your questions at any time using the webcast portal's Q&A feature. We'll answer your questions at the end of the presentation. This session will be also recorded, and a recording of the session will be made available on Efecte's investor website. With that, I'll hand over to Niilo. Great. Thank you, Lari, hello, everyone. As Lari said, what we're gonna do is walk you through Efecte's Q2 results, talk also a little bit about the whole first half of the year, and after that, as always, go into the Q&A. With that, let's get going. Just to ground us into what is Efecte as of today, we help the European mid-market to digitalize and automate their work. We have a proven SaaS product, and as you could see from the numbers, already clearly over EUR 20 million on net sales on a rolling 12-months basis, a growing ARR, and growing profitability, and an employee count that has grown in the past two years quite a bit, but now the growth has slowed down a little bit as per plan. The big vision we have is to build into the service management market, which is dominated by global Goliaths, a strong European leader in this space, and that's the journey that we are on at Efecte. What it means is, in the midterm, by 2025, growing our revenues to EUR 35 million, and eventually to EUR 100 million with high profitability levels. Our strategy of getting there is based on four core cornerstones of growing organically, developing our product to be even more competitive, building on our people and culture, and doing M&A. Now what I'd like to start with is to review how we did in Q2 against our strategy. In growth, I was actually quite pleased where, where we ended up. Sure, services revenue growth slowed down a bit, but SaaS growth was at the... what I consider, a very healthy level of, +25%. We were able to drive new customers, especially across our direct markets. The international growth was also something, something, that we were happy with. As you know, a large part, over 70% of our business, is still in our home country of Finland. What we've been doing, over the past few years is grow the share of business internationally. In terms of the product, it was a pretty exciting quarter. As you might remember, in early second quarter, in April, we launched the first GPT-powered features in Efecte Chat. That's something that many customers received with excitement, and that's something, a motion that we're gonna build on also now in the second half, with some more announcements and more product that we will ship. We also continued the big programs of renewing the self-service experience and also things on the Agent UI side. Not to forget about ITSM Essentials, which is a more streamlined package for streamlining the deployment of new Efecte customers and kind of lowering the bar of getting started. People and culture have always been a core focus at Efecte, we've been enjoying high employee satisfaction and low attrition levels now already for an extended period of time, as mentioned, while we grew the headcount quite a bit last year, now, as per plan, we've slowed down the pace of requirement and focused on: How can we get this team that we've grown over the last year to be as productive as possible? One, one thing I'll note here also is the news from earlier this week. Taru, our CFO, is moving on, we're certainly gonna miss Taru as a great colleague. At the same time, also, I'm super confident in the team, now led by interim CFO Tommi Mäkinen, in being able to continue successfully what we do in the finance department. During the Q2, also, Jenni Mickos joined our leadership team as vice president, services. In M&A, that's an interesting space. Obviously, you know, there's been a lot of talk on the market about private company valuations, public company valuations, and, you know, how they are trending. Overall, I consider the environment where we are in quite promising for M&A. We are engaged on different fronts there. As, as you know, we didn't make any transactions in Q2 or earlier, earlier in the year, but we've been finalizing the integration of InteliWISE, which has been very successful and actively looking for next targets. Let's look at how did we do against the guidance for the full year. Here is a reminder. Obviously, the guidance is for the full year, and here in the grid, you see the individual quarters and how we have been doing in the individual quarters. SaaS growth-wise, strong, strong result, and as we said in the report, we reconfirmed the guidance, we are confident about our ability to meet the full year guidance there. In terms of adjusted EBITDA, we saw an improvement in Q2 versus Q1, which I think is good. We've said that we do want to get to a double-digit Adjusted EBITDA by 2025. It's good to see now on a quarterly and yearly level, kind of how we, how we track towards that. In that sense, I think it was pretty good what we achieved in Q2. We did have to balance slightly the slightly less-than-expected professional services revenue than on the cost side, which we did, ending up with this slightly positive Adjusted EBITDA. The SaaS metrics are something we look into quite a bit when we run the business on a quarterly, monthly, weekly basis. Here are a couple of things to highlight. The SaaS growth, the 76% here refers to the H1. SaaS growth, the recurring cross-margin stayed at a very good level. We were happy about that. The net retention, I'll comment on that. That went slightly down. We've been at that 110+% range, a few percentage points above, for, for quite a period. Now, we were at 109, and if you kind of deconstruct that figure, what, what you notice is that, actually the biggest factor in there, was the cross churn, which, as we commented earlier, kind of has returned to what we consider normal levels around that 5% ballpark. Look at the split of growth between existing and new customers. We actually were able to drive pretty good growth from new customers, which I think is important. We've, we've always been strong with the existing install base, it was good to see the traction during the first half, now, now with new customers as well. A few things on overall finances. I, I already mentioned about the professional services performance. The top line was slightly less, both in Q1 and Q2, than, than what we expected going into the year. Through that, also, the Gross profit, the contribution to the bottom line of, of the whole company was somewhat less than expected. We were able to balance that then on the cost side. Overall, the plan is pretty simple. You know, we, we are gonna now, this year, as per guidance, deliver a positive Adjusted EBITDA, and then, next year and, in 2025, we'll eventually get to that double-digit, or towards that double-digit range that we've set as a target for 2025. Looking at what's happening in the markets, it's been mixed signals that we've received from customers. In different countries, different segments, it's a little bit a different story. There, there are pockets of the market where things are pretty fast still at, at, at the moment, despite any, any talk about an economic downturn or slowdown. Public sector demand has been strong, and we have been engaged in there increasingly, which has been good, and, and we plan to do that also going forward. Our direct markets and new customer acquisition in the direct markets has also stayed overall at a good level, but we have seen some impact in, in some areas, one of them being new customer acquisition through the partner channel, which slowed down a bit, as, as you saw from the, from the numbers. Overall, I, I feel that the market obviously is the same for everybody who are engaging in it. These are the type of times when there is change and, you know, some headwinds in the market, when market share can be grabbed, and that's what we're focusing on as team Efecte. Trying to find ways to navigate the slightly softening market, and, and, and put our bets, put our focus on the places where, where we can help new and existing customers to digitalize and automate their work as much as possible. Good. Hey, I think, with that, let me actually invite Santeri to join me here. Hey, Santeri. Hey, Niilo. How are you? Good, good. How is it going? Yeah, pretty good. Pretty good. Kind of warming up slowly- Yeah, you're doing- ... slowly. Yeah, good. You know, getting towards the most exciting parts of the presentation. Good. We are a software product company. In a way, in this kind of a company, it all starts with product truth. Yes. That's why I think it's fantastic to have you here, being our Product Chief. Share your thoughts on what we did in Q2, and maybe we can talk about, you know, a few things going forward as well. All right, very good. I'd be happy to. Okay, hey, good day, everybody. You know, when we started the year, we actually defined a couple of portfolio-level development priorities for us: easier to use, work smarter with AI, and faster to start and maintain. If we start with the easier to use, where our goal really is to help customers to improve their employees' experience, and through this, the metrics like, for example, Net Promoter Score. During Q2, quite nice progress here. If you look at our next-generation self-service product, we achieved some major milestones with the first customers in production, and also, important functional expansion by now having ability for product to run much more support processes. Also, quite a good progress with our Agent UI renewal, where we released the first update into the really the core workspace of the Agent UI with the, with the early beta release for those. At the same time, we've had a lot of focus on AI this year, obviously one of the key things for us this year. With work smarter theme, what we're trying to do is to help employees to really cope with that increasing workload they're having with the AI-assisted automation and AI-augmented automation that can help them. As Niilo mentioned, really one of the highlight there was the launch of the GPT-powered chat at the end of the first quarter. Now, during the second quarter, we really run numerous demos to our customers, and I think it's safe to say it really has been creating a lot of excitement among our customers. Yeah, I feel the timing was good. Yeah. I guess this goes back to, the InteliWISE acquisition. Absolutely. One, one might say we were, had maybe some skill or maybe a little bit of luck... Yeah ... as well in terms of the timing of the acquisition. Last year, we were able to bring on board a talented AI team... Yes who then helped us bring out those GPT power features, actually amongst the very, very first in the whole industry, which I think, given our, our size, is quite an achievement. Yes, absolutely. I think we're very proud about that. But also, I mean, we haven't seen the end of it, so I think we will- Yeah ... we're gonna- It's just the beginning, what we saw so far. Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna definitely do more here. Also, like, talking about the more broader Efecte Chat products, also exciting quarter. We had our first customers also there going into production, and we expanded the product with some new reporting and in- insights ca- capabilities. Then finally, the faster to start and maintain, where our goal is to continuously improve our platform for so that it's easier to maintain, and through this, our customers can reduce their operational costs. Some of the improvement achievements there, also. Sorry, some of the important achievements there, for example, with our eCom product family, we released new productized connectors that help us to deliver faster and with less cost the different packages we have in our eCom product family, and also number of security improvements, which is something we continuously keep looking at and obviously take very seriously. We continued some important development there as well. Overall, I would say again, like a very, very exciting quarter, some nice progress in the product. Stay tuned for Q3, actually, since during next quarter, we're gonna have our Digitalize and Automate event, which is our main product launch window in the year. More things to come then. Great! Hey, thanks, thanks, Santeri. Now that you mentioned Digitalize and Automate, our main show of the year, why, why don't we talk a little bit about that too? Yeah. Yeah, certainly. What, what, what's up? What's in the plans? Yeah, well, you know, first of all, let me, let me just say that, we are really proud about this event. It's really one of the top events in our domain in the Europe. Big, big thanks to all of our teams, but also our customers and partners who have made this event throughout the year. This year, obviously, our theme is AI, super topical. It's really, you know, we're, we're having so many discussions-... about AI, doing a lot of development, and there are a lot of things happening there. We felt it's really, really what we wanna do is to bring everybody together and look at this from different perspectives, and have different experts and speakers to, to bring this type of, kind of starting to connect the dots in AI, and what does it mean in the IT industry, and obviously for service management, where we play. How are we gonna do that? Obviously, I just wanna call out some of our world-class speakers. We have a really lineup of some very, very inspiring speakers. For example, Mr. Daniel Susskind, who is a Fellow in for Oxford University, and he's been writing a lot about the, the, the work itself, the future of work. He's gonna talk about AI from the point of view of society and work, and what does that all mean for us as people who, who do the work? Päivi Rekonen, a very distinguished board professional, member of board in some very leading companies, like Wipro and Konecranes. Päivi is gonna take more of an industry perspective, so he, he talks about-- she talks about IT industry, what are the challenges and opportunities today, both looking at the cost pressure, but also the new technological development like AI. Then, Amane Dannouni from Boston Consulting Group, who then goes more into the service management and talks about how AI impacts really the future of service management. Okay, sounds, sounds exciting, and looking, looking forward to all the events in the different, different cities, and obviously all, all analysts, investors, media, also welcome to join. hey, before going into the Q&A, a quick wrap-up of, of, of where we are and, and where we are going. We reconfirm the guidance, as said. we're confident that we'll deliver the over 20% SaaS growth for the year, and also positive adjusted EBITDA for the year. We did comment, just as a heads-up, that during H2, we believe the SaaS growth will slow down somewhat from the levels that we saw during H1. There are two drivers for that. One is that the InteliWISE acquisition, and the InteliWISE numbers will become part of the comparison period, now starting Q3. You know, that, that will have some, some impact. In addition to that, we do expect a slight slowdown of the organic growth rate as well. You know, we always try to be transparent and set, set the expectations, so that's what we expect in terms of SaaS growth for the second half. Ultimately, summing up to SaaS growth that will exceed 20% for the year, as per our guidance. I think with that, let's move on to the Q&A section and, and see if you have been as active as always in posting the questions. Santeri, can you stay here with me to. Yeah ... take the questions? Sure. Fantastic. you know, we can tag team with that and see what we come up with. hey, Lari, are you there? Yes, Niilo, I'm here, and we have a healthy pipeline of questions as well. We like healthy pipeline, so, you know, fire away. Yeah. If we start with the first one: Your new sales was strong, while the upsell was lower than seen in recent quarters. Could you elaborate on how the soft market impacted those figures? Sorry, can you repeat the very beginning of the question? I think I missed that. Yeah, sure. Your new sales was strong... Mm-hmm ... while the upsell was lower than what has been seen in recent quarters. Okay, got it. Got it. Yes, let me address that. Actually, if you look at the growth with existing customers, let's double-click on how that number, that net retention rate of 109%, is calculated, and then I think we'll find the answer there. You take the MRR, start of the 12-month period, and then you look at all customers who have churned, and you remove them from that number, and then you add the upsell to that number, then you have the end-of-period MRR. That's how we get the number which to compare and to calculate the net retention rate. This means there's two components of it. There's the upsell, and there is the churn. As our churn has increased, from, you know, the super low levels we saw a year ago, like, you know, 2-point-something%, to what we consider more normal levels, around 5%, that's already 3 percentage points impacting the Net retention rate. Actually, the upsell amount hasn't changed that dramatically. The biggest factor there in the install base growth has been the increase in churn. By the way, I mean, obviously, it's not something we guide or, or forecast, but, but, you know, as a, as a generic statement, we've always said that we believe that long-term, that sort of 5% ballpark for the Gross churn is, is probably, you know, the, the long-term normal level. Addressing the other part of question about new, new customers, I was very happy with the number of new customers we were able to drive in the first half. If there was something I could have wished more of is even more new customers through partners. That, that was the piece there where I, I, I think, there could have been more, but overall, as also the question remarked, strong performance with new customers. Thanks, Niilo. Next, we have a question on sales: Why do you believe your in-house team performs better than your partners in the softening market? The difference relative to H1, 2022 is rather substantial. Thanks. Another good question. I'll start with noting that, of course, the, in a, in a way, the period we look at is still relatively short, so I, I don't want to draw too far-fetching conclusions based on this data. As, as mentioned in the question as well, it definitely was a, a, a difference that we saw. Let's start with how does one sell these kind of solutions and especially platforms like Efecte? It's a relatively complex solution sell. The, the good thing about it is that these solutions, once sold, are extremely sticky. Customers don't want to change unless absolutely necessary. What it means is that then the sales process, as typically we are in a replacement sales business, it's long, because customers want to think through it quite thoroughly before making the decision. It might be, this is just, you know, a hypothesis, it might be that in times when customers become more careful in their buying behavior, you know, it might be more difficult for partners, especially new partners, to kind of find the whole justification for the customer to take that big leap and get into changing their existing platform into, into Efecte. That could be one of the one of the drivers here, but we will see going forward. This will be something we follow very closely. So it's not, not just that, you know, we, we realise something happened, but we follow this, this very closely. This also has a product component in it, which I think we, we, we could maybe discuss a little bit with Santeri here. I think it could be helpful for, for all of you. In terms of what can we do product-wise to lower that threshold- Mm. -and make it easier for customers to, you know, say that, "Okay, let's, let's go for it," or even, even kind of try at a smaller scale? and we got something there, in the product development pipeline. Mm ... that we call ITSM Essentials. maybe, Santeri, you could, say a few words about that. Yeah, yeah. Sure. Absolutely. So ITSM Essentials is one of our main product development programs we're having this year. During Q2, we received, like, an internal milestone called Ready for Sales, which allows our sellers to start talk about that, and then Q3, we plan to actually release that so that it's really available to deliver. As Niilo mentioned, it's really targeted to, to make a make a package that is easier to start for our customers. Then that's something that we quite consistently hear from the market, both directly from the customers, but also through different surveys and research that we pretty actively look into. Even though customers definitely want to have that benefit of platform to be able to, over time, expand new processes and do automate the, their operation, so in these times, that, that starting point needs to be really cost-efficient and quick, and also low risk. By creating a package that actually can deploy really, really quick, in a matter of days, and, and give that type of confidence. I think that's one of the things that we hope from a product point of... will help us to, to, to close new deals, obviously. Mm-hmm. We've had some of our partners, be part of that- Yeah ... input process for it, because these kind of things are, might, might be even more, sort of, important when delivering through the channel, so... Absolutely ... Will be great to see how the new offering will impact, impact the new sales. Yeah. Thanks, Niilo and Santeri. Last quarter, you won Helsingborg, and now you've won Uppsala. You seem to have gained traction among larger Swedish municipalities. Could you tell us about the market and your position? Yes, great question and topic I'm very pleased to talk about. As the ones of you who have been following us for a longer time know, that while we've been able to grow over the years in Scandinavia, and mainly Sweden, we've always had a little bit the feeling that, are we reaching our full potential there? Then I, I've often remarked that I believe no, that, you know, we probably have more that we could have done and could do in the region. Now, in the last you know, six, six to 12 months, it's been fun to watch how the team there has been able to gain, gain traction and, and, and find these opportunities and, and perform very well in some of these significant public tenders from the cities in these two cases. Overall, if you, for example, compare to Germany, in, in, in a way, counterintuitive, but the market awareness and, and kind of, position of Efecte in Germany has been stronger than in Sweden, which which is counterintuitive. We've been in Sweden for a very long time already, but now that makes it even more fun and pleasing that we have been able to turn that around a little bit and create this traction there. I feel at the moment very good about what our team in Scandinavia is doing. As of today, while we call it the Scandinavia region, and we have a few customers outside Sweden, the main focus has been definitely on Sweden, and I think there's lots of potential once we get that in a way, cemented, to expand also then what we do in Norway and Denmark. Thanks, Niilo. Next, we have a specific question on Uppsala deal. Can you comment on how big was the Uppsala deal? I would assume it's a public deal, and this could be found also from the public sites. How much MRR and services? Yeah, thank you. I, actually, because it's, it's in Sweden, I'm not 100% sure about exactly what elements in there are public or not, so I, I won't give you now, just to be on the safe side, the exact, exact numbers. Let's put it this way, it's, it's big enough that I know the exact number. It's not the size of, you know, a Kela, Kela deal for sure, but it's definitely a very good size new customer for us, and excited to start working with the City of Uppsala team. Thanks, Niilo. Next, moving on to professional services. You mentioned that you have and will be managing the cost level in the service organization. What measures does this include? Are reductions in the workforce included? Let me first clarify the part of cost management. What we said in the report and what we referred to was managing cost overall. Not, not just in the services department. What we said was that services top line and the gross profit contribution to the whole company has been less than expected. The reason that we were still able to get to the levels of Adjusted EBITDA that we did, was that we managed overall our cost level across the company to mitigate that less than expected contribution from professional services. As responsible management of the company and whole team Efecte, obviously, all the time, we look at all available means to determine what's, what's best. At the same time, I do want to also point out that there is a lot of demand. While, while the growth rate of professional services has slowed down, there is a lot of customers who need help from us and, and who need help delivered also by our partners. It's not like we're facing a situation where we're thinking of, you know, how, how, how do we just ramp this all down and, and, and reduce the team to a minimum one, et cetera. That's not at all the situation where we are in. We're in a situation where professional services has been growing. It's been growing now, now lately, slightly less than before. We just need to balance these different P&L line items to make sure that our profitability development going forward, follows the plan that we have shared. As you guys know, we take great pride in trying to hit the targets that we set to ourselves, even if sometimes the bar is high. That, that's the focus, focus of myself and, you know, rest of the team here. Thanks, Niilo. Next, we have a question on leadership team. During past a couple of months, 2 members of your leadership team have chosen to leave Efecte, while traditionally, your attrition levels have been very low. Can you comment on the reasons behind these recent events? Sure. I, I believe the que- question refers to our CEO, Stefan, leaving last spring, and now on the news of Taru, our CFO, moving on. You know, to put it short, both transitions extremely natural, as always, slightly different different reasons and situations behind. Stefan spent m- more than three years, really, you know, getting our commercial operation to the next, next level with implementing some sales processes and setting up the partner ecosystem, et cetera. And he moved on to another another company and another job. We decided to split that responsibility, which was quite broad. Stefan was responsible both for sales and services. We hired Jenni Mickos, a great new addition to the Efecte team. She started in June as VP Services. We're in the process of hiring a Chief Revenue Officer who will then be responsible for the sales part. What comes to the CFO transition, Taru has been our CFO for the last 4 years, and in a similar fashion, put in place a lot of finance process. We've very successfully moved on to a cloud ERP system, and you know, all the basics are in place, and I think this is a great opportunity now for us to also think, like, what's next in terms of the finance function? You know, what, what are the kind of skills and, and capabilities that can help us to get again to the next, next level from here? From my point of view, you know, it's a coincidence that two of these transitions happened, you know, quite close to each, each other. You know, there is no, no mystery behind it, and, and, and business goes on and, and I'm very confident in, in the team that we have in place. Thanks, Niilo. Continuing on the same topic: will the recent changes in leadership team affect bottom line, and when? Okay, that's an interesting question! Let me just repeat it to make sure that I understand it right. Will the changes in the leadership team impact the bottom line, and when? Yes, right. Okay, I, I guess there are multiple ways of, of how, how to think of what's behind behind that question. I guess I, I, I would assume the, the main question is that now, with us being able to hire new talent into the company, when will we be able to further improve from the level that we've operated at right now, and, and when could that be? I point towards our, our guidance and our, midterm targets, for 2025. We've said that by 25, we'll get to double-digit EBITDA levels or, or, or above, and, that's the track that we are on, and, and that's the target to which, towards which we are, working. At the moment, when I look at where we are and, and what's ahead for us, I don't see any reason why we would not be able to get there. Thanks, Niilo. Moving on to long-term targets. In your release, you reconfirmed your long-term target of reaching EUR 35 million revenue organically by 2025. Given the slightly slower net sales growth in H1, do you see your net sales growth accelerating in the coming years? Yeah, well, obviously, if you do the math, what, what it means is that there needs to be substantial on net sales growth in the next couple of years for us to get there. On the other hand, it's, it's nothing which is, you know, way beyond the levels that we have seen, in, in some of the years. So yeah, if, if you think about what, what is the level that we need to get to, I think it is within reach. I have a question for Santeri. Can the ITSM Essentials package-ized product offering be seen as a first step towards product-led growth model? Hmm. Okay, yeah. Excellent question, and maybe first just to, again, like reiterate what is ITSM Essentials. It is a, it is a new package offering we are building that really targets to create an easier starting point for the service management journey, right? If we're asking that, okay, are we, are we, are we creating this kind of a packaged offerings more, and are we targeting PLG type of offerings going forward? Absolutely, yes, but in the context of not kind of creating this type of a very locked-in or boxed-in offerings for customers, that they, they can only do that- Mm ... what the package, package is doing. So, so hence, I, I always like to remind that the, the, the, there is this element of combining the power of easy that comes from the ITSM Essentials with the power of platform, what we have today, and, and these two, we believe will be the, will be the good winning, winning formula for us. So yeah, I mean, in, in, in, in short, I think it, it, it will give us more elements towards product-led growth, but doesn't really take away of that power of platform and building, building towards bigger solutions that many of our customers are using today. Thanks, Santeri. Well, let me just comment on the questions of cheap product-led growth. Just want to share, it's a topic we spent quite a bit of time debating... Mm ... with Santeri and rest of the leadership team. in our space, and it's enterprise software, it's, it's a complex solution sale, so it's not straightforward how to do, or turn this suddenly around completely into a product-led growth model. I mean, today, it's more, you know, sales led growth model. That said, I think it's very healthy and very useful to think about some of the steps that we can take in that direction. as Santeri said, now with ITSM Essentials, that's definitely one step in that direction. Absolutely. Thanks, Niilo and Santeri. Next, we have a question on growth. Despite your fairly recent conversational AI expansion, your growth from customer expansions has been trending downwards after adjusting for increased churn. Any thoughts on why expansions are slowing down? Expansion sale happens in different, different forms. One is organic growth. As customers grow and, and they hire more people and, and they need more licenses for the same that they were using previously. There is more use cases that the customer can adopt, so we call it use case expansion, without really buying any new modules, thanks to the flexibility of the Efecte platform. Then there is the new modules part. There are certain capabilities that we price separately, like, for example, conversational AI and identity management is another, you know, very popular one in recent, recent times. Then, then there is, of course, a role that price- pricing plays as well. Looking at these components, the first one, that organic growth from customers growing their headcount, that's where we have seen the largest impact. Then on the other hand, with the use case expansion, as we saw, when COVID hit in 2020, sometimes difficult economic times play even in our favor because customers kind of don't want to buy new platforms, make new big investments, but they instead look inside. They look at their enterprise architecture to figure out, like, what are systems we already have in place and we could use to continue our digitalization and automation initiatives, which still, even in the more, more challenging economic times, are on top of our leadership agendas. That's some, some of the backgrounds, you know, you know, some arrows might point downwards, some might point upward, and, and, and then the end result is, is what we have seen. No dramatic changes, but, of course, a slight, what we, we call it also in the report, a slightly softening market. Thanks, Niilo. You recently mentioned that you have been debating the product-led growth model within leadership team. At the moment, what other questions have you been debating inside the leadership team? Growth, product, people, and M&A. You know, the four, four cornerstones of our strategy, definitely form, in a way, the backbone of our leadership team agenda and discussion topics. Kind of, going across, of course, there are some, you know, financial topics now, of course, profitability overall, and how to manage the P&L equation in a responsible way. Adjusting for any potential scenarios of what might happen, you know, later in the year or next year. We've built scenarios for, you know, if there is slower, slower growth, slower demand from the market, or if there is more to do, and, you know, what does that mean for us? What kind of decisions can we take today, to prepare for, maximizing our ability to, one, help the customers to digitalize and automate in these different scenarios, and two, take as many steps and as fast as possible towards our vision of building the clear European leader in service management in any one of these scenarios? Thanks, Niilo. Next, we have a question on Spain. After being some time now in the Spanish market, how does the market appear now for you? ing market. As some of you might know, Spain, as a nation, has put quite a bit of effort and also money behind an ambitious digitalization agenda countrywide. Digitalization and automation is top of the agenda, not just for individual organizations, but the whole country. That having been also one of the reasons why we wanted in the first place to establish a direct presence in the market. We have seen that it's a relationship and, in many cases, a partnership-driven market. some of the successes so far there have been thanks to what we are doing with local, local partners, and, and that's also the approach that we take, take going forward, that even though we have direct sales on site, they also spend quite a bit of time working with and through partners. Thanks, Niilo. Next, we have a question on Poland. You seem to be hiring some new people in Poland after the acquisition. In the coming years, do you plan to grow aggressively in Poland? There, there are two different perspectives here. One is, is the perspective of, what kind of business opportunities we see today and tomorrow in Poland? Then, what kind of role can Poland play as, as a hub for our different functions and as a talent pool for, for all of Efecte? Maybe we'll start with the latter, and Santeri, maybe you can also. Yeah comment on this. At Efecte, we have some long-standing relationships to Poland also before- the InteliWISE acquisition in, in terms of R&D collaboration. Now, with the acquisition, of course, we were able to build, our own, own direct presence and, and have a R&D team on our payroll. Yes ... in Poland. and, is there anything you want to maybe comment on, on, on that, in terms of what, what kind of role the Poland team plays now and, and going forward in our- Yeah product and R&D function? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Well, well, obviously, like the, the AI is the, the key theme there, so that's that has been the team that has allowed us to move very fast with the latest AI features. Also going forward, I think we've got a very, very strong roadmap on, on things that we plan to, to build there. That combined, obviously, with the close proximity with the people we had earlier there, really allowed us also to move fast on the integration piece. As you may remember, we integrated pretty quickly the InteliWISE product into the Efecte platform already, already late last year, and I think that is also another thing that has, has served us well. So yeah, I mean, I think we're very, very happy, happy with the team and, and the collaboration from an R&D point of view there. Great. Great. Also, you know, while the job market has cooled down a bit everywhere, including Finland, I think it's still very healthy for us to have access to that much bigger talent pool. ... than what we would be able to tap into here, here in Finland. I mean, we do R&D in two locations: in, in Finland and in Poland. Yes. Now, the talent pool is, is many, many times as big as it used to be. Yeah. Yeah. with Poland being part of them. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Like, some of the software companies would know that there's, there's every now and then, like here in southern Finland, it's not been the easiest thing to attract talent, so I think the, the Poland gives us much more leverage in terms of that, so I think that's, that's really great. by the way, it's not just R&D and product. While that's been the, let's say, main focus so far, in, in, in terms of leveraging Poland as a hub, there are also some other functions. We, we do have people also in customer support and, and some other functions in, in Poland as of today, and I think it's a great option for us to leverage going forward when we need to grow our team, to deal, deal with the growing business in, in basically almost any one of, of our functional areas. The second part, Poland is a business opportunity. You know, it's a, it's a growing economy, growing country, and of which Poland has, in, in a way, grown in prominence quite a bit in the last, last couple of years, and we are super happy to be there. We have recently launched, we hired an ITSM salesperson right before summer, dedicated on that area, and accelerating our ITSM sales efforts there as well. Then, of course, assuming we're as successful as we plan to be there, that will then drive further growth and further expansion of the team. While, while of course, when you look at the growth, growth of revenue and growth of cost, we want to keep those two curves the right way, where cost overall at the Efecte level grows slower than the revenue growth. Thanks, Niilo. Next, we have a question for Santeri. Is there anything new coming up this year on AI-related, related products from Efecte? Yeah. Santeri, can you please reveal your best-kept secrets... Yeah ... to the whole world question? Yeah. Well, I mean, the easy answer is, yes, that's safe to say. There is, I mean, no, no doubt, no doubt, obviously, more to come in the DNA, but, just to, if I just maybe give a little bit of a color, like, what are we doing, how we think about that. I mean, obviously, you know, one thing is to stay, stay, like, honest with our mission to digitalize make work. We're very particular on how to apply AI into our platforms. We don't think of it like that, okay, let's kind of bring AI and, try to do something in, you know, with all of our data, and so some, some, some magic that maybe, maybe has a need, maybe has a benefit for the users or not. So we kind of think the opposite, that, okay, what are the real-life use scenarios our users are facing every day, those real human beings? How do we bring AI to them in as easy manner as possible, so they don't actually need to know anything about the technology? I think the GPT-powered chat was a great example, that it's such a super simple. It's just like pressing a button, and it will help you. Similar mindset will follow, and we're gonna bring this to other parts of the platform to help both agents... If you think what agents are doing, so for example, email, one example, our agents are spending a lot of time, so you probably will see something there. For all the end users who are really just trying to get answer to questions and problems, we're gonna bring also AI assistance there to help them get answers quicker. These are the kind of things that we're gonna now consistently kind of bring in and augment the employees and users who are using our platform with this AI assistance in a smart way, in a very, very, like, a contextual way, in those places where they, where they need help. Thanks, Santeri. Continuing with product topics, how do you see the demand for IGA trending versus other solution areas? Yeah, I mean, great question. I think if, again, kind of roll back a little bit here, IGA was one of the kind of the key topic across last year in terms of developing it and launching it, and I think very happy with the teams. I think we, we kind of brought out a full family of packages to IGA last year. It, it kind of validated what we believe, that there is really a market need for this type of easy to start, easy to use, packaged use cases, where it, it kind of takes a very different approach than the earlier identity management solutions that required a lot of customization. We saw a lot of demand, and I think we've started to get a good, healthy number of customers immediately after we launched. I think we've seen that same demand be there. This year we've been really focusing on, like, further developing the product so that it's ever more easy for us to deliver, so that we can offer it more cost efficiently, both for us and for our customers, and also so that all of these use cases work as optimally to the customers as possible. Yeah, I think it's we've, you know, we've seen steady, steady amount of new customers coming in, and by improving the product, I think it's we're gonna have a good future for that product as well. Thanks, Santeri. Given that our time with the webcast is slowly coming to an end, we have one final question on M&A. What type of M&A discussions have you been in after the InteliWISE acquisition? I won't give you now any concrete examples, but I'll point to what we said earlier about what type of M&A are we interested in. Obviously, that's the type of discussions we seek in the market. There are a couple of different types of M&A. You can roughly categorize them into two parts. One is adding capabilities onto our platform. InteliWISE was a great example of that kind of acquisition, where we acquired another SaaS business who had a piece of technology that can be integrated into the Efecte platform, making it stronger and more compelling for our customers. Another category is acquiring market share and customers, and that could come in a few different flavors. It could be a consulting company in a specific market with salespeople and consultants who might be engaged in business, either Efecte business or, maybe working with a completely other technology, and, and where we could acquire the company and then bring some of those customers onto Efecte platform and acquire that consulting and sales capability, and very experienced people in the industry, in that specific market, to strengthen our position. Another example could be acquiring a competitor, somebody engaged in the same space and, and do a little bit of a consolidation type of acquisition, where we acquire the team, team and the product, and, and, and, and through that, grow our absolute, absolute size and, and maybe migrate some of the customers onto Efecte platform, et cetera. There are these different types of acquisitions that we would be interested in, and that's the type of targets that we have screened in the market and also, also been seeking to discuss with. Thanks, Niilo. With that, it's time to wrap up this Q2 2023 webcast call. Thank you for tuning in, and have a nice autumn. Great. Thank you also, on, on my behalf, for watching. Let me just comment to wrap it up that, again, you know, another quarter, another H1 behind us. Lots of events everywhere outside Efecte, inside Efecte. That's how it goes, when you grow a business, when you are in and on an ambitious journey to build a clear European leader, to be able to be the alternative to the global goliaths in our space, and, and, and that's the type of journey that we are on. I'm as excited as ever about this. I think we have a great team in place and, and look forward to speaking with all of you again after the Q3 earnings.