Hello, everyone. My name is George Iwanyc. I'm one of the technology analysts here at Oppenheimer. Today, I have the pleasure of hosting Quantum. We have Jamie Lerner, the company's CEO, as well as Ken Gianella, the company's CFO. We're gonna start up with a, a brief presentation from Jamie, and then after that, we'll do a handful of Q&A, some fireside chat. Jamie, I'll turn over the, the floor to you. Thanks, George. I thought I'd do a rapid-fire introduction to Quantum. Quantum's a over 40-year tenured company in the storage industry, and the company started many years ago as a hard drive maker, but we've evolved into a leader in unstructured data. I'll dig more into that, but just to give you some size and dimension of the company, we've got roughly 10,000 active customers. About 52% of the Fortune 100 use our technology, along with many of the world's largest hyperscalers, many of the world's largest movie and television companies. Many of the largest federal institutions use our technology in defense, intelligence, national laboratories. A very widely used technology. This will give you other sense of it. We participate in video surveillance technology with the world's largest airports and casinos. We have media and entertainment technology, that's why we work with broadcasters and sports teams. We preserve data, have technology that preserves data for decades and even centuries, and we work with many public and government institutions to preserve data for long periods of time. Where we specialize is unstructured data. To give you a sense, structured data would be information that's held in databases, rows and columns, numerical data, names, addresses, products, sales numbers, very structured information. We deal with unstructured information, that would be like a CAT scan of the human mind, a genomic sequence, a feature-length television show, an X-ray or an MRI image. What makes this data so interesting is, one, is it's the largest amount of data in the world. It's the fastest-growing amount of data in the world. What makes it most interesting is that data that's in a database stays there its whole life. Unstructured data actually evolves, in that very often it's a raw material that's used to build something. Your genetic information may be a raw material that's processed, analyzed, and then a cancer-fighting drug is built based on that. Your CAT scan may be a raw material that's analyzed, studied, and a surgical procedure is designed based on that analysis. Information may come in about geospatial information, and a self-driving car algorithm is made with it. Unstructured data is actually used to build the products that we all use, whether the movies we watch, the experience we have when driving a modern car, and then the music, the television, the self-driving capabilities or safety capabilities, they're actually built with unstructured data. When we think about our portfolio, it handles the whole life of unstructured data, and it's our belief that the companies that use our technology build better products. They make better movies. They make better autonomous vehicles. They make better television sets. Whatever they're using unstructured data to build, they get a better result because our technology is fully integrated for the entire life of this data, from when it's first created to when it's ingested, processed, analyzed, enhanced, and then usually it's preserved. If your genes are sequenced, if you take an X-ray or MRI of your body, it's kept for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, maybe even well after, you're gone. We handle that entire life cycle, along with the workflow processing as it moves through that life cycle. What we've been doing with this portfolio as we've brought it together, we used to operate in very niche businesses, and now we're moving to much wider enterprise adoption. We used to sell point products, and now increasingly, we're selling our products bundled into a full solution. Selling the product on an annual recurring, kind of pay-as-you-go model, and ultimately evolving from what was kind of historically thought of as a tape company to really an end-to-end unstructured data management company that has some of the world's fastest technology, as well as some of the longest-lasting preservation technology. What we've most recently announced is some large transformational work we've done. One of the transformations we wanted to do is modify the mix of our customers so that our margins would be north of 40%, and we've guided this quarter that we'll be in and around 42% this quarter in gross margins. We've done a lot of integration of acquisitions and efficiency work in our company. We've brought down our OPEX to at or below $34 million, and we've had a 78% growth in our annual recurring revenue. We've been very successful in those areas. We still feel that we're subscale, and we see in the back half of the year about a $10 million-$15 million expansion of our quarterly sales, which gets us not only into the scale we need, but really starts to generate much more expansive EBITDA for the company, and we feel we have the pipeline, the sales processes to achieve that. A lot of questions came up recently about, you know, do we have the runway to complete this transition? Do we have the time? Do we have the management flexibility to complete the work that we began several years ago? Ken, I, I thought I'd turn it to you to kind of explain the arrangements we have. Yeah, and thanks, Jamie. One of the things that we've done recently was we went and got a covenant forbearance, that's gonna last about 24 months with us. You have to put a base case together, and you look at a lot of different scenarios, and, you know, where we're at today and the outlook that we put out there for the next 12 months, not just this fiscal year, but looking ahead, we have plenty of runway and headroom within our covenants, actually we're above that forecast to where we're at. The good news of all these elements that Jamie talked about, we had these levers pulled already. You know, getting 40%+ gross margin, being thoughtful and in doing the exercise we did to lower overall operating costs, and so we have the tools at our disposal to get there. It's executing and getting to that scale in the long term. Part of what this outlook does is we will not have any covenant issues over the next 12 months. Then it's now taking that step up. How do we get from that $17 million that we forecast to the $25 million, to the $30 million, you know, our goal is to get to $50+ million in EBITDA over the next few years. We still, with this forecast, see that we are gonna be cashflow, at least operating cashflow positive, by the back half of the year. So we think we have the runway with what we're operating on and where we're going with this. You know, as Jamie said, many of our investors asked that, George, so, before you jump into your questions, I wanted to get that one, right out of the gate. Great. Maybe Jamie, starting with the overview that you provided, you've done a lot to monetize the overall technology stack that Quantum has. You've moved towards software and subscription services. Tie that together with how the customer is reacting to all the changes. You know, how are you touching them? How is the end-to-end sales motion going? How are they, you know, starting to digest all those changes with respect to their use of Quantum? Yeah, the, the way we're going about it, you know, we have a long history with the 10,000+ customers we have. Many of them have been our customers for over 20 years. Where we're starting is going to those customers and saying, "You use a given product from us, do you like it?" In the vast majority of cases, they say, "Yes, we, we like the product. We believe we get good value, and it does all the things you said it would do." We say, "Well, if that's so, let us introduce you to these other technologies, other products that can bolt on to the product you have and allow you to do more things." We're, we're expanding, you know, our footprint in the existing customers and, you know, building off of the, y ou know, the easiest customer to sell to is a happy customer. Where we engage with new customers, where we differentiate from our competition is, you know, our competition will come in with a piece, and we'll have that piece as well, but multiple other pieces to bring around it that are just deeply differentiated, and that's how we're winning more deals. We're expanding our footprint in the install base with more products and more value, and when we go head-to-head in the competition in new deals, it's our ability to come forward with a full portfolio against a single product player, and we can usually unseat that single product player with a portfolio approach. Great. Maybe put that in perspective of your historical strengths in secondary storage, in media, in, Cold Storage. How you're transitioning to an enterprise-oriented customer base, you know, shifting to primary storage, getting your software adopted. Well, I'm glad you asked that, 'cause a lot of people falsely assume that we're predominantly a tape technology company and don't know that almost all modern movies that you watch today are made, or some part of that movie is made on very high-speed Quantum equipment that has nothing to do with tape. We have all-flash technology that makes The Mandalorian, Star Wars, Saturday Night Live, CNN, BBC, NBC, hundreds of other media and entertainment products. We get to as high as 80% of television and movies are made in North America, are made on Quantum equipment. That's been a strong point for us, and that's why we're so good with unstructured data. We deal with movies, we deal with photographs. Many fashion companies use our technology, many branding companies. Some of the biggest brands in the world, from Apple to Gucci, Balenciaga, Rolex, Nike, Skechers, all use our technology for their brand management. Because of that cachet, we're able to say, "Look, if we're handling this sports, event, why can't we also handle the video surveillance? Why can't we also back up your data? If you trust us to make a Oscar-winning movie, why don't you trust us with surveillance, with backups, with other workloads around your business?" We've really been springboarding off of those successes. We're heavily used within federal governments and defense agencies, intelligence agencies. Because of this incredible high-speed technology we have, it's used for surveillance initiatives, analysis initiatives. Finally, because of all this work we do, it leaves a lot of data that you're not gonna delete, right? You're not gonna delete these feature films, you're not gonna delete this fashion photography, you're not gonna delete medical imagery. We also do have technology that can preserve data literally for centuries. That's what we've been working with the hyperscalers on, is building archive tiers, and we really lead the world in archiving data, right? The Library of Congress, NASA, some of the most valuable photographic data, literary data in the world is preserved on our equipment digitally, including the archives of Disney and all these, you know, very renowned. Think of them as art companies. We really work with the high-speed data, and then when we've done processing it, we preserve it for decades and centuries. That, that long 40-year history in doing that, we're incredibly well-trusted, right? We've been doing this for decades. We've been doing it for the biggest companies in the world, and now what we're doing is going more broadly. You know, we didn't normally go to oil and gas companies, go to banks, financial institutions, and now we're saying: "Look, we've been trusted for decades in these niche markets." Now we're going out more broadly and saying, "Let us help you with your unstructured data needs." It's really AI ML that's driving that, that almost everybody, almost every company in the world has large archives of unstructured data that they wanna analyze, get value out of, and we're starting to engage much more horizontally than we have in the past, and that's really driving the expansion that we see over the next several quarters and the pipeline expansion we've seen as more and more companies are coming to us with help with, with those kind of workloads. Great. Maybe digging into the visibility then that you have, when, you know, you've just provided guidance and, you know, there is a, a bit of a rebound in the second half of the year that you're guiding to. When you look at that guidance, how much of that is coming from existing customers, you know, giving you some visibility a quarter or two out to what they will need? How much of that is executing on the current expansion plans with newer products like, you know, Myriad, which would be GA later in the year with, you know, the classical StorNext or ActiveScale type of customer? Yeah. First of all, all the expansion that we see in the back half of the year is with products that are on the truck. We're not leaning into new products, even though we are introducing, you know, a major new product, Myriad, but our forecast is based on products that are on the truck now. Secondly, about 70% of our sales are to the install base, so these are customers we know, we have a long history with, we understand their buying pattern, we understand who the buyers are, how procurement works. About 70% is really into that install base, and only about 30% is, is new expansion- 30% is new expansion customers. Right. Ken, maybe you can tie that to how you build up the model from a forecast standpoint. What are the things you look at from, you know, the sales force inputs that you have from the supply chain? You know, you've gone from a situation where you were supply-constrained, and you had a big backlog, which you've now worked through. You know, looking forward, you know, how are you building up that guidance? Yeah, well, I mean, forgetting the natural S&OP process and the interlocks that we do as a company, what we put and provided in our investor deck, you can see the different verticals and the different products and the different regions that we operate in. The confidence you get out of the pipeline is the backup and, and the growth of that pipeline that we've seen over the last six months, even the last year, of where we've been in these different verticals. Especially in the ActiveScale, and C old Storage area, a lot of the primary business that we're seeing the growth in, in the federal. First, we have this great sales force that's been out there, that have been here for well over a year now with this rotation that we've done. They're firing on all cylinders now. The pipeline has increased over the last year to a point of where we have a lot of backup in many of the product categories. That gives us the confidence of the ebbs and flows that you normally see in a quarter, George. We now have that confidence that we have the backup and the support for that to manufacture it. The second part of that question is from the manufacturing side, is that, you know, the supply time and lead times are shrinking greatly. I mean, it's coming exponentially from just where it was 6 months ago. We have a lot more flexibility. The costs have come down, and so getting new parts in isn't taking a lot of overhead and a lot of increased costs the way it was, prior. It's helping our margins out also. Really, this lack of supply chain constraints now, really is making a lot more nimble to execute on the pipeline we see in front of us. Great. Maybe digging into the hyperscale relationships, can you give us a, some perspective on, you know, how many different customers, how that relationship is changing? You, you did highlight that, you know, this is shifting faster than you expected. Like, is that macro-driven? How much of that is, you know, a change in the way that they're using Quantum? Yeah, almost all the change in hyperscaler is attributed to one more than 10% customer we have, going from $22 million spent with us last quarter to effectively zero. They're still deploying our technology, they just have a lot in inventory. They, they do have multiple people supplying them now, so we're not the sole supplier, and their business is slowing down a bit. Most of this slowdown is news from a single customer, and basically, most of our business is pretty distributed risk, except we have a high concentration on this one customer, and that's predominantly where the dislocation came from. I have to say, it doesn't take a lot of inspection to realize, that while it's a large revenue removal, it's a pretty negligible EBITDA removal. We took $55 million out of our annual forecast, and that had a $3 million EBITDA impact. Pretty, pretty hollow revenue there. You know, I think as we think about hyperscalers, we still want to serve them, we want to work with them, they're important customers to us, but we do have to be really mindful that they drive very, very low margins. We've just got to look at them deal by deal and say: Where does it make sense for us to work with them, and where do we add value? Where is this just a commodity play and, you know, maybe it just doesn't make sense for our business model? 'Cause I, I really think the hyperscalers, you know, they begin needing your technology a lot, and then they work very hard to devalue your technology, commoditize it, press it down. As they start to really press that technology down into... I mean, they really like to operate probably at 4% or 5% margins. Think of it as like Foxconn. They, they want to look at us like we're Foxconn, and for some of the hyperscalers that work that way, I just don't know if that jives with our business model. Some of the hyperscalers that see value, that want to collaborate with us, want to, you know, see value in what we do and see value in our software, I think there's a path forward. I think to where it's deeply commoditized, I just think it may be better for them to work with people who can do 5% margin business in, in a commoditized way. When we think about our pillars of profitability, George, that we laid out, it's really about getting that rotation up the value stack, particularly within the more software-driven, focused elements of our business, the primary non-hyperscale secondary business. The sales force that we brought on over the last year, these folks specialize in going into the Fortune 10, Fortune 25, Fortune 100-type companies and building those relationships. And we're focusing on specific segments, as we show in our presentation, that allow us to get the higher value out of people that are looking for AI ML, biotech, industrial-type technology situations, that you're looking for high quality, high speed, storage. Great. Yeah, Ken, maybe staying with you a little bit. When you look at the margin profile of the various product portfolio components that you have, how do you see mix shifting? You know, when you look at the 42% gross margin guidance, that's, that's encouraging, and, you know, that seems to be sticking into the second half of the year. How does that continue to evolve over the next, you know, 12-24 months? Can you kind of level set, you know, hyperscale, secondary storage, primary storage, and the services elements? Yeah. I'll start with the hyperscale, just as Jamie talked to it. excuse me. You know, you're looking somewhere between 15%-20% today. We see that ebbing to the right as you start getting that technology pressure. The strategy of the product set was always to rotate more back towards our core business. The primary section within our business, that's gonna range from 50%-65% gross margins. Secondary, you know, that, that area is gonna be operating just below that in the 50%-40% type of gross margins, so secondary non-hyperscale business. Our services business has always traditionally been 60+, with what we can bring to the table in our managed services offerings and the care and feeding that we give to our customers. On our latest quarter, our subscription ARR model continued to grow 78% quarter-on-quarter. That subscription and recurring ARR business overall, that's a strong 66% gross margin just last quarter. This rotation isn't just about us being more effective and efficient in operating the manufacturing and services business, it's also that product rotation more to these higher margin products rather than servicing, you know, the media, the low-end devices, and the, the hyperscale portions of our portfolio. Okay, great. When you look at, kind of building up the new products from a, you know, a software subscription perspective, I think right now you have, you know, 700-800 customers that have landed. 89% of your new customers are landing there. What, what are the typical characteristics of those new customers? How are they engaging? You, you have a little bit of history now, you going back a year. What has changed with those initial lands a year ago and with their expansion rate with Quantum? I mean, I think the subscription model gives us and the customer a tremendous amount more flexibility, right? We have a wide portfolio, and they may, at times, need high-speed processing. They may, at times, need mid-range, at times, archival. When they make a large physical purchases of those things, they're kind of stuck. With the subscription model, they can move around. They can say, "Hey, I need some of this software from you. Hey, I need to modify my subscription to get a little more of this software." I think it gives them a lot more flexibility. It allows them, you know, to fit our technology to their business needs that are changing frequently, much more flexibly than the old enterprise models, where you bought hardware, or you bought a perpetual license that lasted for years, and you were kind of locked into it. It, it gives us a lot more flexibility, and I think that flexibility allows people to consume more and consume more quickly because they, they don't feel as locked in. It's a shift in our selling motion, too. Right. I mean, we, we began this two years ago, and it's training your workforce to how you go and sell these end-to-end products and how you get the subscription base in there. We're getting a lot more successful with our, with our new customers. I think the one area, George, that we are gonna still have to cross that chasm is with our existing customer base, those who wanna continue to add on capacity as Jamie said, is getting them more comfortable with that subscription-based model, and we're starting to see some early green shoots there and, and are really positive of how that's going. Our new Myriad product, for example, that we're gonna be launching, that's 100% subscription-based. Software. So, and in a software base, right? It's, it's platform agnostic, we'll see more of that rotation towards subscription. What's really interesting about that, the subscription is for software. To do that, the software has to be separate from the hardware. In doing that with all our products now, you know, when I'm in China, I don't have to force someone to take my hardware. I can go and say, "You use local Chinese hardware makers," and put my high-value software on that, and I don't have to do the manufacturing, the shipping, the logistics. India, the same thing, where they're really pressing back on not-made-in-India technology. Fine, use all the hardware from India. Let me put my high-value software. It's allowing us to play in geographies that, as a hardware maker, it was very hard to play in, but as a software vendor, we have a lot more flexibility. Now I can partner with people. Think of like hardware makers, like Supermicro, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard. I can now work with them and say: I don't compete with you. Just take my software, put it on your hardware, and now we can collaborate. As we making this rotation to software, it, it does not only change our margin profile, it really opens up a lot more flexible geographies and selling motions that were really closed to us as a hardware maker. Right. Ken, could you maybe provide some perspective on how a customer engages with a subscription? Is this a, a month-to-month payment? Is it a, a couple-year contract? Are there any dynamics that you can kind of solidify so we understand, like, the type of visibility you get from, you know, the, the shift to software and subscriptions? Yeah, absolutely. It traditionally, the way it is, it starts with a three-year engagement, that can be renewed annually at the end of that three years. The first set of subscriptions that entered onto this model were just coming up for renewal this year. I'm pleased to say we have near a 100%, renewal rate on all those subscriptions. We give the flexibility for one, three, one or three-year buy, but, you know, most customers end up going with the three-year plan, and they pay up front with that. Right. We have incentives to do longer term. Yeah. So the key is, George, is that it's very well planned. It gives you a lot more visibility and runway in managing your business, and the flexibility of that is that they do pay up front, so you're not worried about, you know, collections or anything like that. All right, and Jamie, back to you. You know, you mentioned Myriad would be completely in the, the subscription category. This is a, a big change for, for Quantum, you know, and can you put it in perspective of how it works with StorNext and ActiveScale, and can you tell us how this expands your customer conversation? Yeah. Let me cover a couple things here. First, what's so interesting about Myriad to us is it's one of the first enterprise products we have. A lot of our products are a niche product for media and entertainment or a niche product for certain government, you know, institutions. This is just a generic enterprise-wide product that I think every company in the world has some form of a product like this. What makes the Myriad product so fascinating is it has no bindings to anything around it or underneath it, meaning you can run it on any hardware you want, Supermicro, Dell, HP, Huawei. You can take that exact same software, put it on Amazon, put it on Azure, put it on Google. It runs literally on anything, and it runs extraordinarily fast. We're seeing four, six, and eight times outperformance of today's fastest solutions. It is arguably, and we have some more benchmarking to do, the fastest storage product ever built, and it scales unlimited, meaning you can chain 1,000 of them together, 5,000, 50,000 of these modules together, and it just keeps, in a linear way, getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Even if it is colossal in its size, it is simple and effectively brainless to operate. It doesn't have a lot of dials and tuning, it just runs, and it runs fast, and it runs for long periods of time. It's a game-changer in how easy it is to use, how flexible it is, how fast it is, and how feature-rich. What we're hearing from customers is they're gonna be able to do AI and ML workloads that they just simply can't, couldn't perform, couldn't find a way to do today. We've got a few more months to get it stable. It's complete, but we gotta harden it and make sure that all the little, you know, kinks and, you know, quality issues are worked out of it, but the initial feedback's really positive. The business model, it is pure subscription. We can help you get the hardware, but you can buy the hardware yourself. You can run it on the cloud. You can do whatever you'd like to do with it. It's pretty fascinating, and it's fully integrated to our ecosystem, meaning this is a very high-speed platform, but if you wanna hierarchically move data down to our slower platforms and ultimately our cold platforms, it has all that tiering. We expect that when people buy Myriad, they'll probably also buy ActiveScale, so that they have a high-speed area and then a much less expensive and larger, think of it as a data lake. They can pull data up from the lake into the high-speed area and then move it back down to that lower-speed, less expensive area. It's pretty exciting, but it's still early days in it. This is, to put it in even more context, the area that Myriad plays is the highest margin and fastest-growing segment in the storage industry today. It's all part of our strategy to move more towards higher margin, higher growth segments, and move out of some of these older areas that we've been in that are low growth, low margin. We'll see how it plays out, but that's a lot of white space for Quantum over the next two to three years. Now, when you look at a customer that is already an ActiveScale customer, are they able to run from a single dashboard, Myriad and that deployment, and, you know, is it pretty much fully integrated? Is that the plan? Yeah, I mean, we, about four to five years ago, in partnership with Apple, we begun building a cloud, think of it as a command center, we call it Cloud-Based Analytics, for all of our products. Any product you buy from Quantum immediately plugs into this cloud dashboard. You can see what you've bought from us, you can see how it's working, you can make adjustments to it. You can hand the controls over to us, and we'll run it for you. It literally is a cloud-based platform where you can be running Quantum products that are distributed all over the world, distributed into the cloud, distributed in data centers anywhere, and you just can run your whole Quantum ecosystem, including many third-party products, all from a centralized dashboard. We've had that in production now for about four years, and we have over 2,000 customers running on that today. George, when you think about the repatriation of data, as things move around here to there, a lot of these companies over the last three to four years have been shedding IT staff, shedding folks on premise that are gonna be monitoring and managing it. As we go through this transition, these tools that we have and our service team that's been running these managed services for people already, this same dashboard will still give the owner the flexibility to see and understand and work with their data. We can help them as that extra set of hands and that extra set of technical expertise from remote sites around the world to do managed services for them. You know, it's an exciting proposition. As we start seeing, these data movements happen, folks don't have to be worried about where their staffing is gonna be coming from. You get the product on site, we help you set it up, and we can help you run and manage it over the long haul also. Right. Ken, maybe a, a couple last questions on how you're managing the, you know, income statement at this point, given OpEx. You know, how are you still looking at ways to optimize the overall structure of the company to help drive cash flow as you go through the couple of tighter revenue quarters that you have right now? Yeah. Thank you, George. I mean, I think the number one thing is, is looking at our global footprint. If you look at the company just a few years ago, we were very U.S., European-dominated, with our headcount, very high-cost regions of where we operate. Over the last few years, we started opening up different sites and centers, particularly in Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, in Bangalore, in India, and then down in Guadalajara, in Mexico, but we really never utilized that, that global footprint that we had put out there. We started a few months ago, really a strong effort to see where we could globalize our footprint a little bit stronger and better. We started those initiatives to lower the overall cost, but not lose the overall operating capacity that we have today when lowering that cost. The second piece is, while we've done a lot of inorganic elements over the last few years, we never really got rid of all of the overhead or multiple overheads, including some facilities globally. One of the things I did when I came on board, partnering with Jamie and partnering with our team, to really look at those areas that we could shut down. We made really big progress in finalizing that consolidation of acquisitions that we've done over the last few years. I think third and finally is continuing this operational excellence. What are the things we're doing? Forget the margin rotation. We're gonna get that with the sales team, and we start seeing the proof points come there. It's really working with manufacturing and services, to get automated scripts in place, doing the things that we can do on the service side to, to lower the human touch, starting using the own Quantum products to drive more, machine learning and more automation into our, our processes and our scripts daily. These are all things that can take cost out of the business and lower overall, operational spend. While we've made some big moves here recently to, to lower that, I still think we are just in the early days and early innings, of what I think we can do with the overall cost profile. Great. Maybe finishing with you, Jamie, one last question. If you, like, summed it all up, what are the kind of two big key points that you would keep investors focused on over the next quarter or two as you get back to that second half rebound? Yeah, I mean, I, I think the two things that I think about the most is, first, our achievement in gross margin at over you know, 42%, and our cost-cutting initiatives that really line us up to generate the kind of EBITDA that's expected from this company. You know, I think that, combined with all of the expansion opportunities with the new products that we're launching, I think it, it kind of all really comes together for us, combined with the fact that the stock price is at a pretty attractive price, given, recent activity. It's kind of an interesting time to enter the stock, given its price. I think, it's an interesting buying opportunity. Great. Well, Jamie and Ken, thank you very much for the time. I do appreciate the insight. Thank you for having us, George. All right. Thank you.