Cirata plc

We announced the largest live data migrator contract for Serata since we began our journey to rescue the company back in March 2023. Both technically and commercially, the Serata team have risen to the challenge and delivered a product to a really valued customer. This is the largest contract in the company's history for LDM. in financial services vertical and the largest implementation through the IBM Big Replicate platform. Demonstrating that we can land seven-figure contracts is an important signal that we are approaching the end of the recovery process. It's an important day for Serata. In tandem with this announcement, we are withdrawing guidance. Our Q4 cash overhead is running at circa $5 million, which is slightly better than planned. Our cash burn for Q4 will be dependent on the final outcome for bookings and cash collections in the quarter. We therefore anticipate our cash burn in Q4 will show further improvement on Q3. There is much work to do to close out Q4 and management will update the market on the final out-term for Q4 in mid-January. We will return to the process by which we set and communicate guidance a little later in this video. I think it's important to take a moment to remind investors of the journey so far that we've undertaken to get to this point. Let's break down the challenge we were set back in FY23 and examine the scorecard of progress and challenges. We'll publish our summary chart to the investors on the investor relations landing page. But simply put, there are nine KPIs that we set ourselves internally to improve, to monitor and disclose. These highlight both the progress and the challenges for our company in line with our policy to provide the highest level of transparency for our investors. We're certainly not done yet, but we have come a long way along the path to recovery. And then the next phase is the all important growth phase. So take in each of these KPIs in turn. We exited FY22 with a Q4 quarterly cash overhead north of $11 million. And we expect that to be circa $5 million in Q4 as we exit FY24. Our cash burn in Q1 FY23 was $11 million. Our cash burn in Q3 FY24, our last reported quarter, was circa $3 million. We expect our cash burn to show a further significant improvement over the period as we exit Q4. The direction of travel on this particular metric is clear towards cash flow break even. However, as I have said before, in the extreme, There are two types of software company. You either grow fast or you die slowly. And in the long term, you cannot cut your way to growth. So now turn into our core growth product, Data Migrator. Our announcement today, we believe, is a big vote of confidence in the product, the improvements we've made, and in our product roadmap. Data integration year-on-year product growth in Q1 FY23 was a minus 87%. Since then, we have seen a steady quarterly improvement in year-on-year growth through each consecutive quarter. And in our last reported quarter, Q3 FY24, we saw data integration product growth of positive 180% year-on-year. And for Q4 FY24, we expect a year-on-year growth for data integration. We would expect data integration to continue triple digit growth trajectory as we move forwards. The quantum of sales is still not where we need them to be, but the activity levels are up significantly over the last 12 months. We signed eight data integration contracts in Q3 FY24 versus two in the same period a year earlier. In addition, the land and expand strategy is working, where we plant acorns that grow into multi-year deep relationships with enterprise customers. Our partnerships are an important part of our strategy, and we work really hard to rebuild their trust over the last several quarters. resolving legacy issues related to unspent prepaids, better alignment with our product roadmap, and working proactively with our partners to build a qualified pipeline. And finally, lead generation and product discovery. Many of you that follow the company will note significant changes to our digital marketing cadence over the last several quarters, together with a wholesale change to our website and product positioning. This is leading to a significant improvement in inbound organic lead generation with over 35 inbound inquiries in the last few months from virtually zero previously. Obviously, there is always more to do and improve on, but I think the scorecard is moving clearly in the right direction and we're looking forward to building on these foundations as we get ready for FY25. So with today's announcement, our focus now turns to closing out December as successfully as we can. And therefore management time is going to be working flat out on closing business with partners and customers. And we'll come back and share the results of that work with all our investors in mid-January when we come back with the Q4 trading update. Thank you.

Stephen, hello again. A lot going on today. What's the key message for investors and why today for a video communication?

We're landing big seven-figure contracts into challenging environments with the largest customers in the world, just six quarters after a near-death experience for the company. This is the largest contract to date for LDM in financial services and the largest single implementation on IBM Big Replicate. And it validates the hard work we put into rebuilding the IBM relationship and partnership which was announced in Q3. So today we demonstrate that we have an enterprise ready LDM product and we're going to market with a reinvigorated IBM partnership. I will be blunt and to the point, this was a broken company on every metric and we're fixing it from the ground up and have created the foundations for sustainable growth.