I had tunnel vision there. This is it. This is us and then the cocktail hour. We're excited for that. I'm excited for this opportunity to talk to TJ from AvePoint. I've known Jamie here for five, six—no, probably more than that—seven or eight years. I don't know, a long time. It's a small world. He and I met at Varonis years and years and years ago. It's fun to see things come full circle and relationships continue. I appreciate everything that you've done for us. TJ, it's great to meet you as well. It's a pleasure. Thanks for coming here. Thank you very much. You co-founded AvePoint over 20 years ago. Yeah. I was telling Jamie, I've been at RBC now 20 years in March. We started about the same time. You've done a lot more exciting things than I have, but. You guys helped us with our Series B with Goldman and Merchant Banking in 2018. Is that right? Yeah, RBC did the deal. Yeah. So we go back a long time. Yes, we do. You know, I mean, 20 years. I mean, we were just saying it's just such a dynamic market. I mean, you've seen so many trends. We have, yeah. Over the years. I guess maybe just, you know, for those that are less familiar, can you provide a bit more of sort of the background, the evolution of AvePoint? Because it's such a rich story as I'm sort of getting sort of much more familiar with the AvePoint story. Yeah. We always say at AvePoint, we always do the hard things first. We did all this without borrowing money. We started in the infrastructure management space for Microsoft SharePoint, which is their enterprise content management platform. We became the largest in that pre-cloud. SharePoint is only used by the biggest governments and banks, highly regulated industry. Because it is very heavy, it is like OpenText, if you will. For that, we had to go global. We had to do this high-touch enterprise direct sales motion to establish ourselves. Of course, Microsoft came out with cloud in 2010, 2011 days. Ballmer is still CEO. Microsoft stock did not move for 10 years. People were like, "Oh, Microsoft's dead. Google is the thing." We obviously stay close to the customer. We know that there is actually a lot more growth left. We were the first ecosystem player to actually invest into Microsoft Cloud. That effectively allowed us to expand our TAM to the entirety of Office instead of just the ECM part of it. We have done the SaaS investment and SaaS subscription all on our own without borrowing money. In hindsight, we should have done that, either go public or borrow money so we could do this faster conversion. We did it the hard way, if you will. Fast forward to today. Today, we are the largest within the Microsoft Cloud space, the largest B2B SaaS data management, governance, and security player. We are in 18 countries physically. Our revenue, for our sizing revenue, we are incredibly global. 45% North America, 35% MEA, resting APAC. We also not only sell to the Fortune 50, we also sell to the five-man companies. Enterprise is 5,000 and above employees, is about 53% or 55% are recurring. SMB is actually just under 20%, which is less than 500 employees. It is not highly unusual for a company this year will be over $410 million ARR as well as revenue to be so global, to be so cross-sectional and also cross-industry. Of course, we have since gone public in 2021, we invested very aggressively into channel, so the indirect selling motion. That effectively allows us to reach far greater audience at a much lower cost of sales marketing. That efficiency has improved, which went straight to the bottom line. The latest quarter, we are at 22% operating margins. We are cash flow positive, GAAP profitable, and rule of 40. All things are firing on all cylinders. Now we have this flywheel to become a much larger business quicker. I think when I think of AvePoint today, I mean, I think you could describe yourself as a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Data governance platform, just an overall SaaS management platform. Obviously, you've got the Microsoft angle. How do you describe what AvePoint is doing for customers today? And how does that look in the future? Yeah. So AvePoint today, we're focused really on the data management, governance, and security space, specifically unstructured data, which is your emails, your chats, your files, which is, by the way, 80% of all data out there and the fastest growing data segment thanks to AI. Now, in order, so the two top concerns across all boards around the world, one is AI, one is security. We play in both space. Why? Obviously, with security, we're about data resiliency, about ransomware detection and recovery, about agent damages and recovery. The AI part is AI is only as good as your data. You have to worry about your data estate curation, data estate management, lifecycle management, all the stuff that regular industry grown up to do naturally, something we grown up in the regular industry. Today, 60% of our business is in the regular industry. All of a sudden, even if you're not in the regular industry, if you care about having high-quality AI deployments, you need to first prerequisite is have high-quality data management. Yeah. You mentioned before kind of being tethered to Microsoft has had a lot of advantages. It has really helped you guys out. We'll get into the non-Microsoft piece here in a second. How has that relationship evolved over time, especially as you've expanded to sort of multi-cloud SaaS governance platform? Yeah. First of all, we do not resell any of Microsoft software, neither do they for us. We are an ecosystem player. We compete within this trillion-dollar Microsoft ecosystem. It has been a fantastic relationship. Our product teams are very well aligned. We actually see, because we are one of the top global partners, we have a nine-digit relationship in cloud consumption. Not only are we a big partner, we are also a big customer for them. We actually sit on their product advisory boards so that we actually see the product six months to a year ahead of time. For example, today's announcement around A365, we announced pause, agent pause, because we have actually seen this coming six months ahead. We know exactly where the monetization opportunity lies, and that is where we go and invest. Because we stay very close to the customer, oftentimes we actually know the customer better than Microsoft, their use cases. We can then forecast where the additional monetization, the needs are, the pains are. That is how we stay relevant. Today, Microsoft ecosystem is about just over 90% of our revenue. However, most of our customers are multi-cloud. That is the reality. For us to continue to expand our GR and R within existing accounts, we obviously need to be multi-cloud. Today, we support Google, we support AWS, we support Salesforce, and that is going well. That is the multi-cloud reality. Hyperscalers themselves do not really care about other hyperscalers. They also do not really care about saving customers' costs. That is where our value add comes in. For a customer, we are considered a third-party independent. We help them maximize their investment into cloud while securing their data. It's something that hyperscalers themselves don't have that natural inclination to do. You mentioned AgentPulse, which was just announced today, which really brings a lot more sort of tighter security controls around AI agents. Cost controls. Talk about both elements there and what sort of early beta feedback. It's evolution of our ability. We've been doing governance for a long time. We established this whole concept of delegated administration, delegated governance, because IT really have no idea what these data assets, what these agents do, because they're done by business users. What's the context? You ask your IT, what do they know about your set of data? They would have no idea. You do. You say, "Hey, this set of data is associated with this project. It's for this business purpose. It will last this long." Our software has the ability to help end users, business users in just that context. Once you have that rich context, then we take over in an automated way to actually govern and control whether it's a piece of data or a data area or private chat channels or now, in this case, agents. This is the evolution of the things that we do around Power Platform today. Power Apps, Power Platform, we already do those application governance, so guardrails. We already understand the context of the data, and then we overlay access control on top of that, so security control. We can control. First, we audit what kind of agent you have across all your assets, whether it's in Azure or Office 365 or even AWS or Google GCP. It is more. We do audit. Okay. Yeah. We actually help. We work with some of the biggest customers in the world, some of these MNCs. They have thousands of agents running there. We help them actually first take stock of what they have and then rope them under management. That is access control, what other agent they can talk to, what data they have access to, and quite frankly, how long this agent can live for. We actively help them monitor how much inference compute and essentially cost is incurred by these agents. That is a big, big topic. Hyperscaler will never help you save costs. We are out there actively helping customers, one, obviously govern and manage from a security perspective, two, control the cost. From a, you know, you're bringing up agents, which is obviously extremely topical at this conference and any investor conversation these days. What are you seeing from customer deployment? Because it still feels like we're still in the Wild West of agent deployment and agent management orchestration. It feels like you guys play a real critical role in helping organizations feel more comfortable about agent deployment. Where are customers' heads at these days in terms of thinking about where are we in, I don't know, we've got to be in the first or second inning of agent deployment. Right. Last year, folks are, especially in the Microsoft ecosystem, equating AI adoption to Copilot deployments. Very quickly, they realized that actually Copilot deployment is very anemic. Why? Most of the Office Copilots are not good because of the data they ground on. The popular Copilots are GitHub Copilot, which is for dev, and then Teams Copilot for team summarization. We have many cases of the biggest bank in New York, biggest audit firms in New York. Before they turn on Teams Copilot, they actually roll out our governance solution first because we control the Office Graph access patterns. Office Graph is what Copilot grounds on when it makes recommendations to you. If your Office Graph permission is not set properly, your Copilot will be recommending things that you should not have access to in the first place. That's number one. Regular industry is keenly aware of this topic. They deploy that, and then quickly, people realize, we probably do not need to turn on Copilot for every employee, Office Copilot. What we could do is better utilization, using tools like Copilot Studio to design an agent, a chatbot, if you will, or automated workflows to do small things. Still, we will get AI deployed to do specific things like sales optimization, enablement, customer support. AI is being actively deployed in companies, but not every employee will have it. That is what is happening this year. Of course, all the hyperscalers are talking about full-fledged digital employees. We are not there yet. The way they are talking about full-fledged digital employees is that this AI agent will be wired just like a human employee would when it comes to all licensing. The AI will have an email, will have an intra ID, will have access to CRM, will have access to whatever business apps that you, a human employee, will have access to. That is where things are going. We are not there yet, not for a year, maybe even two years, because these are full-fledged, very complex systems that need to be governed with the right guardrails. We are moving towards that. Right now, it is small agents. It is almost like Hello World implementations. It is funny, right? For a while, vibe coding was all the rage. Two weeks ago, people said vibe coding is dead. It is a funny thing. They realize a business user can vibe code something, but that stack is completely different than if you actually need to make this thing work for enterprise-wide scalable deployment. You have to recode the whole thing anyway. That's why there's the reality of enterprise-wide deployment, and there's my Hello World implementation of a small little application. We are still a long way to go to full-fledged AI agents running around. I would imagine you're probably seeing, I don't know, can you decipher internally from your customer base if it's more of the AI natives that are sort of pushing that envelope more so than sort of banks and regulated industries? Oh, absolutely. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, because AI, I mean, Accenture also talks about this. It's not about layering AI capabilities on your existing business processes to be more effective. You have to actually reinvent your entire business processes. AI natives, because they're not encumbered by all the existing stuff, that's why they move faster. I have a funny story for you. One of my ex-bosses, I used to work on trading systems for Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers. My ex-boss is a CTO at BNY Mellon. They're a big Microsoft shop. He managed about 1,000 developers. They're all accelerated with Windsurf. I said, do you guys deliver solutions faster within the bank? The answer is no. Yeah, yeah. Each individual developer is now writing things faster and has 60% of their code being done by AI. Writing code is actually a small, very small part of an overall system deployment. There is requirement, there is projects, there is system integration. People are waiting on each other. Groups are waiting on each other. There is still a lot more to do. There is process reengineering that has to happen for AI to really take off. You've talked about a plan to do a billion dollars of ARR in 2029. You've said that non-Microsoft piece, I think you said, should be about 30% of that billion dollars. Up to 30%. Up to 30%. Salesforce is obviously a big part of that. What are some of the big components of that? Yeah. Actually, again, we have multiple growth drivers. The non-Microsoft component growth, there's the whole SMB through MSP kind of growth. Of course, the other areas where you must invest in is IaaS and PaaS. If you look at the growth velocity of cloud, whether it's Azure, AWS, and GCP, they're all growing much faster than Office Cloud, than Google Workspace. This whole collaboration side of it. IaaS and PaaS is an area we're investing very aggressively. That's where a lot of the interesting things happen in AI. Think of applications, think of VMs, think of workflows. A lot of the infrastructure work that's happening, that's very, very interesting. We're expanding there. Truly, there's multiple growth vectors for us. We don't need every one of those vectors to hit to get to that billion. There's also M&A. We have done small acquisitions to date. We sit on about $500,000,000 of cash. We have no debt. We're generating a lot of cash. Very profitable. We can do bigger acquisitions. We're very tech-focused. This is a founder-led company. We want to do organic integration. We do not want to bring on tech debt. We're also very particular on what kind of IP expansion we want to take on. All these things layered in form our bottom-up approach to get to that 25% year-over-year ARR CAGR for the next few years. If all of them hit, including this multi-cloud flavor, we would do this goal much faster. If half of them hit, we'll still hit our goal. Because as a public company, whenever we announce goals to investors, we have to hit that, if not earlier. Yeah, that's great. Before we go too much further, you guys just reported really strong growth. I think you saw about 19% net new ARR growth. SaaS grew 38%. A lot of these metrics were sort of up and to the right. The one area of softness was U.S. Fed or PubSec. And North America, I think you said you also had a lower mix of term license revenue. I imagine with the government. By the way, North America still grew 21%. It still grew 21%. Despite the public sector softness. I guess now that, I guess, the government is open now, as of this weekend, is there, I mean, how should we think about that into 4Q for you guys, that element? Yeah, from the beginning of the year, we already were managing expectations around public sector volatility. Because there was DOGE, there was late provision day, and nobody knew that there were going to be shutdowns. Q3 performance, we beat and raised revenue, beat and raised op margins. Of course, we did well on ARR as well. The only target we did not raise into Q4 is ARR. ARR is a forward-looking number, and it is very dependent on when a client signs the contract, even though this could be maintenance and renewal. A question I got this morning is like, oh, just because government shutdown, does that mean you turn off the software? No, absolutely not. The software continues to run. The government continues to run their basic essential services. It is really then you find the procurement person now backing office to sign the contract. Of course, now that government's reopened, we are just being prudent in the guidance of the ARR. That's all. Overall, nothing changes. That's why we still raise the revenue guidance. We still raise the margin guidance. Of course, our big number, $1 billion ARR, implies a 25% average CAGR growth for the next four years. Yeah. Okay. Temporary in nature, but I'm sure frustrating nonetheless with the government doing what it's doing. The U.S. government's not going to go away. We continue to invest. It is our singular, all public sectors. We're very strong in U.S. government, Japanese government, Singapore government, Australia government, and now European government. Public sector remains to be a very, very resilient segment for us to serve. Your markets, broadly speaking, I think data protection, just overall cyber resiliency, governance, there's a lot of convergence going on in the market. There's a lot of people talking about this, independent DSPM vendors, SASE vendors, Varonis, others. I mean, how do you kind of see the competitive dynamic playing out? And how does that convergence impact you guys? That's a great question. It's actually very interesting to see. Obviously, all vendors come from their position of strength. Our position of strength is that we've been in the Microsoft Cloud enterprise grade the longest time, and we're able to take that enterprise grade capability to the SMB customers. We're super excited about that. That now is just under 20%. We think the next two, three years, as the overall company at least growing minimally 25%, that could become 30%-40% of our business, which is Microsoft's overall SMB business. That's fantastic for us. Overall, I think we compete from a platform perspective. We have different competitors in different segments. In the enterprise, on the resiliency side, we will run into a Commvault, a Rubrik. In the SMB, we'll run into somebody like a Veeam and an Acronis. In the control governance side, in the enterprise, we'll run into a Varonis. In the SMB, we'll run into startups. In the modernization, we run into enterprise, we'll run into something like Informatica, for example, or Quest Software. In SMB, again, different players, smaller players. Our power comes from the singular platform, and customers want one less throat to choke. Also, because we've been running SaaS the longest and we have all the credentials, whether it's FedRAMP High, whether it's Japanese ISMAP certifications, which is a 2,400 security certification, Singapore's ODC certification, et cetera, we built this moat around compliance, around rigor, around cloud operation, cloud security, because every other week you hear of somebody being hacked. We have a really good reputation in that space of protecting and governing our customers' data in cloud en masse, every single day within just 700 petabytes of data. That's a massive amount of data that we're protecting. Operating at enterprise scale and now with the flywheel of channel and global nature is what makes us highly attractive and continue to win new logos for us. Big market, not winner take all for sure. Not winner takes all. Yeah. You guys are offering that consolidation play that the market. Give me a backup, right? I was sharing with you yesterday this morning. Think about pre-cloud. Who are the big backup players in the world? There is EMC. Yep. There's Arcserve. There's Veritas. There's NetApp. Those big players, each one of them has a multi-billion dollar revenue stream. In cloud, you're also going to have, yes, there's convergence. The backup player is getting into security. The governance player is getting into posture management, et cetera. There is convergence, but I think there's plenty of room for everyone to continue to grow. Yeah. Yeah. I guess when you start to see some of these players across the variety of these markets, can you talk about win rates? Yeah. I'm sure there's a huge expansion opportunity, but that net new business, can you talk about sort of the win rates that you're seeing? Today, over 90% of our revenue comes from the Microsoft Cloud space. If you view Microsoft Cloud, specifically Office Cloud, as mission critical, and when we do bake-offs in key accounts, whether it's Goldman or JPMC or Deloitte and PwC, et cetera, our win rate is very high. Because we have that enterprise-grade capabilities that we developed over the last 10 plus years. We have the power of the platform. Ultimately, customers do not want multiple vendors to deal with. They want a few sets of high quality, high enterprise-grade and security capability vendors that they can rely on. In enterprise bake-offs, we have high win rates. Now, of course, with channel, we have that scaling. That is the volume business. Our goal is to continue to expand our platform offering so that we can be more sticky, be able to help customers to upsell. One of the ways we're doing it is actually infusing AI into the UI. Ultimately, the latest generation AI is the new UI. Our vision is that every single customer should have an infinitely customizable experience with our product, with our services. We're also now moving all the back end to Fabric so we can offer data as a service to our customers. There is a lot of signals that we track and we trap that's not openly available to them through the hyperscalers for different reasons. That is also a very attractive monetization capability. We can proactively tell our customers based on everything we track that these are the risk exposures, these are the cost overruns, and you should do something about that. That is what we're super excited about, to actually increase this self-upsell and cross-sell capabilities of the software. The other thing that I wanted to ask you, just especially with you guys being so tight in the Microsoft ecosystem, does identity governance, thinking about any obviously, could that be an opportunity in the future for you guys? Absolutely. We already do that today. Oh, you do? With the governance side of it, with security posture management. It is identity management. It is access control management. We do some of that today. We can do more. That is also convergence, by the way. The identity management security guys are now trying to get into this data agent management. We come from the data agent side, and we are trying to get into the identity management side. Now the question is, which one is harder to do? Yep. Obviously, I'm biased. I'm the data guy. I feel that the data side is far more complex. You have all kinds of data. You have time series data. You have multimedia data. You have chats. You have emails. You have files. To give you an example, as much as people talk about Snowflake and Databricks and Datadog, when we talk to senior executive at Microsoft, when you specifically talk about Microsoft Cloud as API access, they don't see Snowflake. They don't see Databricks at all. Because those guys have plenty of data that they're working on that's not related to Office unstructured data, your emails, your files. That tells you how big the space is. Data management, the nuance and complexity of that, it's our wheelhouse. Of course, we're going to overlay more. We already do access management. We're going to overlay identity management to wrap this whole governance, agentic governance story to be more complete. The other guys were coming from a different angle, but we feel that our problem set's more complex, and we've been doing it longer. We think that for us to get into their space is easier for them to get into our space. Yeah. Especially the Microsoft piece has got to be a huge advantage, understanding the roadmap and that relationship as well. What do you think the biggest misconception is about AvePoint today? I think a lot of people historically think being a Microsoft ecosystem player is a negative. Because tomorrow, Microsoft is just going to coast. It's been 25 years. I think what they don't appreciate is that hyperscalers all have their ecosystem, and they derive strength from their ecosystem. Microsoft will say, hey, I have such a vibrant, robust partner ecosystem. My platform's more sticky. Don't go to Google ecosystem and vice versa. We don't compete against Microsoft. We compete within this multi-trillion dollar ecosystem. We do that very successfully. We're expanding to other ecosystems. I think if you want to ask a single most missed perception about the company, it's like, oh, you guys are so in the Microsoft ecosystem, Microsoft tomorrow can just kill your business. Not knowing that actually for Microsoft, we are actually a value-add augmentation. Because we actually help turn on the Purview SKUs, turn on the E5 SKUs, now turn on Copilot. We actually help land so many workloads. We're nothing but complementary to them. Because we actually do integration. When customers have these advanced SKUs, we integrate with it. When they don't, we augment. Of course, this multi-cloud angle, Microsoft will never do. This cost-saving angle, Microsoft will never do. Their lives are thriving and growth opportunity. Yeah. We've talked about it. We've got a minute left. We've talked about a lot of growth opportunities. When you sit back and you reflect on your career and creating AvePoint all those years ago, if we're sitting here three, five years from now, and we reflect back on the single biggest success between now and then, what do you think with all the things that we've talked about, what are you most excited about that we should really, as investors, watch closely with AvePoint? I'm very excited about the current technology disruption. I think in three to five years, a lot of software companies today will not exist if they don't reinvent themselves, if they don't stay agile and execute. I chuckle when people ask, do we have four deploy engineers? Because all of a sudden, it became a term. But we've been doing that for a long time. You have to have services about 12% of our business. We do very deep eight-digit deals with customers to services, whether it's with Singapore government, U.S. government, Japanese government. That's how we stay ahead of it. You have to stay very close to your customers, provide value-added services to design new solutions, new IP, and to see where the puck is going. That's very important. If you're a software company without this kind of embedding, you will be disrupted very easily. Excellent. With that, we're out of time. TJ, Jamie, thank you again for coming and this great conference. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks.