Kinaxis Inc.

calls. Currently all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we'll conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time for you to queue up your questions. I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded today, Thursday, October 31, 2024. I will now turn the call over to Rick Rodsworth, Vice President of Investor Relations at Kanaxas, Inc. Please go ahead, Mr. Rodsworth.

Thanks, operator. Good morning and welcome to the Kanaxas earnings call. Today we will be discussing our third quarter results, which we issued after close of markets yesterday. With me on the call are John Scard, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Bob Perteaux, our Executive Chair, and Blaine Fitzgerald, our Chief Financial Officer. Some of the information discussed on the call is based on information as of today, October 31, 2024, and contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those set forth in such statements. For a discussion of these risks and uncertainties, you should review the forward-looking statements disclosure in the earnings press release as well as in our CDAR filings. During this call, we will discuss IFRS results and non-IFRS financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA. A reconciliation between adjusted EBITDA and the corresponding IFRS result is available in our earnings press release and in our MD&A, both of which can be found on the investor relations section of our website, kanaxas.com, and on CDAR+. The webcast is live and being recorded for playback purposes. An archive of the webcast will be made available on the investor relations section of our website. Neither this call nor the webcast archive may be re-recorded or otherwise reproduced or distributed without prior written permission from Kanaxas. To begin our call, John will discuss the highlights of our quarter and recent business developments, followed by Blaine, who will review our financial results and outlook, and Bob will provide an update on some recent strategic activities and open the line for questions. We have a presentation to accompany today's call. It can be downloaded from the investor relations homepage of our website, kanaxas.com. We'll let you know when to change slides. Over to you, John.

Thank you, Rick. Good morning and thank you all for joining us today. I'll be starting on slide four. We delivered solid third quarter results that allow us to increase key elements of our guidance for the year. We reported $78.6 million in SAS revenue, representing 16% growth. Total revenue was $121.5 million, or 12% growth. We reported over $30 million in adjusted EBITDA, representing 32% growth and an impressive 25% margin. I'm extremely pleased with the steps we've taken to enhance our profitability. As Blaine will highlight, this result and our outlook will allow us to raise our profitability guidance for the third consecutive quarter. Moving to slide five. Once again, we want an impressive number of new customers equaling the total from Q3 last year and up slightly year to date. This is an ongoing reflection of the strength and persistence of demand for supply chain orchestration solutions and of our superior position in the market. Our enterprise tier contributed the highest number of new wins for the quarter. Last year, we spoke about a 60% plus win rate against our core competitors, and I'm thrilled to see that performance continue year to date. During Q3, we announced a number of new customers. I'm happy to share a sample of those with you now. In life sciences, where we continue to dominate, we've been selected by Ono Pharmaceutical, based in Japan, a company committed to creating innovative medicines that focus on oncology, immunology, neurology, and other critical areas. We added Octo Pharma, based in Switzerland, one of the largest human protein manufacturers in the world, employing nearly 12,000 people to support the treatment of patients in 118 countries. In the industrial market, we won Kronos AG, based in Germany, a one-stop shop for producers of liquid consumer goods, including solutions for production, filling and packaging through to plastics recycling, and more. We also won Nippon Saiki, based in Japan, which manufactures and sells instrument clusters for automobiles, motorcycles, construction and agricultural machineries, marine instruments, air conditioning, and much more. In the consumer products space, we've recently added CMI Foods, which has a vast portfolio that includes food processing and production operations, animal and pet foods, and standalone restaurants. Suave Brands, a US-based producer, which you probably recognize from the shells of local retailers, creators of affordable quality hair and body care products. And finally, in the automotive sector, we're proud to be working with Mahindra, a leading high-growth company in India that offers both internal combustion and electric vehicles and boasts a workforce of approximately 10,000 employees. As you know, these successes and many more have been earned in an environment where buying decisions, particularly for our largest opportunities, continue to be subject to elevated levels of scrutiny. Moving to slide six, we continue to widen Maestro's competitive gap as some of our newest innovations hit key milestones, including some of our unique AI-based products. Our brand new Gen. AI-enhanced client experience is being used extensively today. Over 100 customers have been active on the Maestro AI chat agent, and we're pleased to see such a rapid uptake. Demand. AI is significantly improving demand forecasts at 14,000 plus restaurants in North America, while deployment is also underway at a very large consumer goods company. Multiple proof of concepts are also in progress and scheduled with other major customers. Supply. AI has been adopted by over 10 customers, and we are in a number of opportunities to see growth by the end of the year. Enterprise scheduling is live for an extremely large global CPG company in key North American sites, and we're heading into negotiations and proof of concepts with other customers for that product later this year. Under the hood of Maestro, we've made good progress with our new data fabric layer that will greatly improve and simplify the integration of AI across the product and with solution extension partners that will be part of an -to-end supply chain orchestration solution. On slide seven, we're absolutely thrilled to continue to receive exceptional validation from third-party industry observers. According to Gartner's voice of the customer survey, 93% of customers are willing to recommend in-access. 93% of the nine vendors in the review, which include two of our core competitors, can access is the only company, the only one to be named a 2024 Gartner Peer Insights Customer Choice for Supply Chain Planning Solution. This kind of achievement is only possible through standing strategy and execution company-wide. We were also named by Nucleus Research as a leader in the 2024 transportation management technology value matrix, which includes our supply chain execution application. Finally, just last week, we were named by Newsweek as one of Canada's most responsible companies for 2025. Newsweek partnered with Statista to recognize 150 companies across 13 industries for their commitment to the climate, social welfare, and responsible governance. In-access was placed number 38 on that list. Since we last spoke, I've held countless phone calls and -to-face meetings around the globe with customers, prospects, partners, industry analysts, and others. I can say that I have never had more conviction about our leading position and the opportunity we have in the market, and I'm excited from multiple perspectives. First, as the current CEO, to be able to hand off to the experienced incoming leaders, a company that is in such strong shape, I'm extremely pleased we were able to secure Mark Morgan as president of commercial operations. Second, as a large personal shareholder of Kanaxis, I remain fully vested in supporting the company and its drive to create shareholder value, and I'm confident in our ongoing success ahead. And third, as a future advisor to the company, quite simply, with over 30 years of my life dedicated to Kanaxis, it is now in my DNA, and I will always care deeply about its well-being. I look forward to supporting the board and the management team through 2025. It has been my greatest honor to serve you, the Kanaxis shareholders, for the past nine years as CEO, and to lead our incredibly dedicated and talented teams that strive for excellence each and every day. I'm extremely proud of the growth we've been able to accomplish together. With that, I'll turn the call over to Blaine.

Thank you, John, and good morning. As a reminder, unless noted otherwise, all figures reported on today's call are in U.S. dollars under our IFRS. Move to slide eight. We reported solid Q3 results with very strong profitability, excellent trailing 12-month free cash flow margins, and are once again able to increase key aspects of our 2024 guidance. Briefly, total revenue was $121.5 million, up 12%. SAAD's revenue was $78.6 million, up 16%. Our subscription term license revenue was $2.3 million, which was higher than expected due primarily to expansions at renewal. Professional services revenue was $35.5 million, up 8%. As I talked about before, our goal is to continue to shift professional services work to partners. Maintenance and support revenue was $5.2 million. Our gross profit was up 17% to $76.4 million, or a 63% margin up from 60% last year, primarily reflecting lower cost of services following recent restructuring initiatives and a large proportion of revenue coming from higher margin software business. The software margin was 76%, and the professional services margin was 32%. Adjusted EVDA was extremely strong, up 32% to $30 million, or a 25% margin versus 21% last year and 19% last quarter. This reflects our continued heightened focus on profitability and relates to very successful initiatives aimed at gaining offering leverage as we scale. Beyond the usual items, for better comparability of results, we have excluded from adjusted EVDA $3.1 million in special charges relating to consulting fees for the review of our strategy and -in-queue executive transition costs. Our profit in the quarter was $6.8 million, or 23 cents per diluted share versus 25 cents a year ago. After tax-effecting the special charges, they reduced profit by $2.2 million, or 0.08 per share. Absent these charges, our profit in EPS would have shown growth over the prior period. Cash flow from operating activities was $29.9 million, compared to a $1.5 million use of cash in Q3 2023. Cash equivalents and short-term investments were $294.6 million, up from $293 million at the end of 2023, despite some of the special charges and our active share buyback program impacting the balance. If we move on to slide nine, as you can see, our trailing 12-month cash flow margin continues to show tremendous improvement. It was .3% in Q3 2024, the highest level since 2020. This was achieved even after significant strategic investments across the business over that time. Again, this excellent result would have been higher absent certain of the special charges. On slide 10, our annual recurring revenue, or ARR, grew to $347 million, an increase of 14% from Q3 2023. 55% of new business added to ARR during the quarter came from new customers and 45% from existing customers. -to-date, the split is the ARR balance continues to reflect the current environment, including generally slower deal approvals, particularly for large enterprise businesses. The S&R HANA migration, which is a net benefit but can extend sales at both near term, ramp deals that start smaller and ramp in future years, and for the first time in several periods, a more favorable FX environment. Our incremental ACV, or annual contract value, added in both Q3 and -to-date is very similar to the amounts added in the comparative period last year. So note all of that flows through to ARR right away. The ratio of annual contract value, or ACV, to ARR -to-date is 1.23, the highest level yet. That compares to 1.18 last quarter and 1.08 at the end of 2022. In other words, due to more ramp deals recently, free ARR is coming in future periods. Looking at, we see reason for optimism. The Q3 -of-quarter pipeline for fiscal year 2025 is bigger than the fiscal year 2024 pipeline was at the same time last year. The 2025 pipeline of expansion business is already significantly larger and represents a much higher mix of total pipelines than it did for 2024 at this time last year. Expansion business has a higher margin and much higher conversion rates, roughly double new name account conversion in recent years. New -to-market initiatives will start to bear fruit as we progress through 2025. We get free ARR from phase deals in 2025 that benefit the growth rate. We have a well-recognized industry leader driving our sales organization and he has scaled businesses to well over a billion dollars in revenue. We also have a maturing sales team that he gets to work with. We believe the more favorable interest rate environment will help spending in many of our verticals. As well, in an October 2024 report, Gartner projected worldwide IT spending to experience one of the largest percentage increases in this century and software spending is one of the biggest drivers. Finally, all these incremental opportunities get factored through our very strong 60% plus win rate against core competitors. On slide 11, our three-year CAGR for total RPO and SAS RPO is 24%, which is extremely strong and reflects both ARR growth over that time and elite growth customer retention, consistently between 95 and 100%. The three-year result is the best way to look at RPO as it normalizes for expected quarterly fluctuations in customer renewal cycles. So we continue to direct your attention to those results. More details on our RPO can be found in the revenue note to our financials. Now if we go to slide 12, I am extremely pleased to be increasing our 2024 profitability margin guidance for the third consecutive quarter while also increasing our guidance for subscription term license revenue. We reaffirm all other guidance elements as follows. We're maintaining total revenue at 483 to $495 million and SAS growth at 15 to 17% growth. We're raising subscription term licenses revenue guidance to 11 to 12 million and adjusted EVA margin guidance to 20 to 22%. We are very proud that our heightened focus on profitability is generating real results. Overall, this is a strong outlook given the environment in 2024. We expect to take another step towards a 25% midterm adjusted EVA margin target next year and will give some specific guidance with next quarter's results after we see Q4 performance as new executives and the variables around our investment planning are further developed. And finally for me on slide 13, we've continued to be active on our normal course issuer bid. Today we've repurchased almost three quarters of the plan limit. During the nine months ended September 30th, 2024, we've repurchased and canceled 724,298 common shares representing an investment of approximately $78.3 million. We've been pleased with our share buyback strategy and the board has approved another normal course issuer bid for the upcoming year from November 6th this year through November 5th, 2025. We can purchase up to 5% of those standard shares or approximately 1.4 million shares with a daily maximum of 15,500 shares subject to typical exception. I'll

now turn the call over to Bob. Thank you, Blaine and John and good morning everyone. Well, I've only been in the role as executive chair for a few weeks now and let me start by saying it's been fun to run with Blaine and John and the management team. I'm so excited about the work we've been doing and opportunities and growth prospects for our business. I'm going to discuss in more detail shortly but first want to take a moment to reemphasize that over the last six months as always our entire board including our newly appointed lead independent director Angel Mendez have been highly engaged in the business including management changes and the review of our strategy. As we announced in September Goldman Sachs has been supporting our efforts with financial advice and addressing inquiries about the company. While the board has not closed the door to any path there have not been any material developments. That's the latest on these topics and we'll provide further updates as warranted. Slide 14 please. As I said the entire board is focused on adding value to Kanaxis. We've taken a number of decisive actions over the last six months which have benefited Kanaxis and will add value to the company in the near and midterm to the benefit of all shareholders. Let me talk about that. We continue to review our strategy both from the inside out and with the help of expert outside consultants. The process has reemphasized that Kanaxis is in an extremely strong position and that we have some exciting opportunities particularly in the -to-market functions that will enhance that position building on our many strengths as a company. Working with management and an elite leading external management consulting firm we've identified the best opportunities, we organized the company to align with them and have moved talent into the highest value roles. We're already benefiting through the development of our growth opportunities and seeing significant improvements in profitability and free cash flow. We're steadily driving towards our 25 percent normalized midterm adjusted EBITDA margin target. We've doubled down and all that makes Kanaxis such a strong company including our product and innovation leadership. Since day one we set ourselves apart with our concurrency approach, real-time processing and embedded unlimited scenario analysis. To that we've recently added market-leading AI capabilities, supply chain execution capabilities, public cloud delivery with Google and Microsoft and a vision to lead the AI infused supply chain orchestration space. The work of Gardner and other industry experts consistently provides third-party recognition of our product leadership. Importantly we're transforming our alliances with the world's most important systems integrators into far more strategic relationships. As you know we signed a contract to co-invest with Accenture to integrate our pursuit of the best opportunities in select verticals and geographies so we can own these spaces. We're building pipelines, creating new deployment capacity, enhancing the delivery expertise, creating joint -to-market resources and even building some vertical specific product enhancement plans. Our joint pipeline with Accenture at the end of Q3 is already ahead of the expectations we had for this time. Other major systems integrators are investing in their Kanax's practices instead of our competition, reflecting our momentum and our joint successes. This is and will create a snowball effect that will reinforce Kanax's leadership position in the market. So, taken together our alliances will bolster our growth paradigm and simultaneously improve margins as system integrators take on more of our services work. We undertaken a number of other initiatives that will expand our TAM, including a broader mandate for value-added resellers, focused upsell and cross-sell of our proven new product capabilities and low-hanging fruit around pricing opportunities. Our competitive position has never been better. Our win rate against our three core competitors continues to exceed 60 percent and certain of those competitors have recently fallen dramatically in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, including two that are no longer in the Leaders Quadrant and our product and innovation strength is shining through. I'm so excited about the addition of Mark Morgan who can help to leverage our enviable market position. Everyone who at Kanax has spoke to Mark through this process instantly knew he was the right guy and that belief was only reinforced by talking to the many people that have worked with him in the past, including partners, customers, many people that know him very well. He's a well-liked, proven leader who knows our space extremely well and has scaled businesses well beyond a billion in revenue. Mark has hit the ground running and we're thrilled to have him on board. A lot of credit for what has put Kanax in such a strong position goes to John Sikart. I am so happy that John will be with us as a key advisor through 2025. Over the last few weeks, John and I spent time with many of our large clients who remain enthusiastic supporters of Kanax. I am thrilled to be able to lock arms with John as we head into the new year. Our CEO search is advancing, progress is positive, and the candidates befit the excellent opportunity that Kanax represents. We'll continue to be thoughtful and thorough throughout this process. As I said at the outset, our numerous actions over the last six months have already increased the value of Kanax and much more value creation lies ahead. I know I can speak for my fellow directors when I tell you that we are moving with urgency and discipline to optimally position Kanax to deliver increasing and sustainable value. To everyone that's listed in, as always, thank you for your ongoing interest in the company and great support to date. We're excited about the future and welcome you on the next step in Kanax's highly successful journey. I'll now turn the line over to the operator to start the Q&A session.

At this time, I'd like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Thanos Masha-Palos from BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Good morning. John, congrats on your upcoming retirement and the great success you've had in accessing your career.

Thank you,

Thanos. Maybe just to start off, it might be too early to talk about 2025, but if you look at recent ARR growth, that would seem to point towards a deceleration in fast revenue growth next year. Would that be a fair conclusion or the offsetting factors you cited such as the pipeline for Q4 and the ramps already in backlog are those meaningful factors that could affect the dynamic?

Yeah, I'll take that Thanos. As you noted, there is a high amount of correlation between SaaS growth and our previous year ARR growth. I appreciate obviously your comment about it may be too early to talk about 2025. We still have another quarter to get through and we're one month into that last quarter of the year, so we'll see how things turn out. I'll remind you that one of the things that I mentioned as part of the script is that there are some interesting macroeconomic effects that I think are in our favor at this day. The IT spending prediction that Gartner has in terms of that increasing for the largest amount in the century is a nice little tailwind that we're hoping to benefit from. Our pipeline, as you mentioned, for 2025 at this point in time, at the same time last year, it's much higher than it was before. The pipeline mix is a very important component of that. It's an interesting dynamic when you look at the difference between the conversion metrics on expansion revenue or expansion pipeline versus a new logo. Everyone realizes that what we've been doing is actually fairly incredible considering the amount of new logos that we've been bringing on compared to the install base that we haven't really moved forward as far as we can at this stage. I'll finally finish all that with we have one secret, I guess not so secret, tool that we have right now, which is we're really pleased to have Mark Morgan on board. I've had the pleasure of working with him now for less than a week, but I think he'll be an incredible addition. Brings a lot of supply chain understanding of the industry, and I think he'll be a great help for accelerating that growth in the future.

Great. Question for Bob. Bob, you said the board hasn't closed the door to any path. Should we take that to mean that the board is open to engaging with interested parties of appropriation?

We're following the process here to create value for the company. And I think my comments, Stan.

Okay. Last thing I'll ask is, has there been any impact on bookings from recent corporate events or has that not really been a factor?

Yeah. At this stage, whenever you have a change in leadership, there should be some type of execution risk that may occur. At this stage, there hasn't been anything that we've encountered. We've been very happy with the outreach, and I think John's been very happy with the outreach from our current customers. I think they're relieved the fact that he is going to be around. He's not going on a cruise over the next couple of years or next year. So we'll see how that plays out. But as of right now, there's nothing that's occurring that is indicating that the execution risk is there.

I'll pass it on to you. I just add that John has been unbelievable and a great partner over the last month in really locking down the customer relationships, engaged in details. He was in Europe a few weeks ago. I'm going to Europe next week. So if anything, we're all hands on deck.

Great. I'll pass it on to you.

All right. Our next call comes through the line of Richard Cete from National Bank Financial Markets. Please go ahead.

Yes. Thank you. So John, all the best in your retirement and advisory role. It's been a pleasure. So I don't know if this is questions for you, Bob, or Blaine, but with respect to your comments around the strategic review, what areas have you identified as having sort of the greatest opportunity? Is it kind of a sales and marketing sort of motion, or is it on the product side? I'm just trying to get a bit more detail in terms of what you've uncovered so far.

Yeah. So maybe I'll take it as Bob. First of all, hey, Rich, how you doing? Look, we're going to push on all our advantages that are in front of us. There's been a lot of talk about -to-market, and the reality is that what we're absolutely doing right at the top end of this is to really think about the monetization of our product leadership. We are absolutely creating a gap between us and the competitors that allows us to really think about our -to-market from a perspective of monetization. The value that our products bring to our customers, and now with AI-infused applications and the demand that John talked about, is one of the biggest parts of our strategy that we're pushing on. Bringing Mark Morgan onto the team allows us to really double down on the industry and global solutions that come along with that. Big push right now in terms of, as Blaine talked about, restructuring or repositioning the company opens the door to take people that are highly talented people inside of Kanaxis and put them into areas where they can have an immediate and dramatic impact on the company, and that's part of the strategy. The whole focus on enhancing our partners' relationships, not unlike Accenture but not limited to Accenture, I think you know that system integrators are the bellwether on the winning formula, and a big part of what we're trying to do is make sure that we're the in-demand, company when it comes to those relationships, and that's working because, as I said, they're over-investing in our platform relative to other opportunities that they could pursue. And then for me, probably one of the big ones is leveraging our customer base. We have, as indicated by Gardner, way higher customer satisfaction than our competitors. We find ourselves in a place where our products work. We're seeing increasing churn coming from those competitors, and we're going to take advantage of that, and so we're doing all the things that great software companies do.

Okay, that's super helpful, thanks. My other question has to do with sort of the comments around that level of scrutiny. I think it's fair to say that a lot of your competitors in the industry are sort of pointing to similar things. So when it comes to that scrutiny, do you think it's kind of normal course of business now, or do you think that there will be a trigger to sort of turn that around again? I know, Blaine, you talked about sort of the Gardner stuff, but it seems like there's something more that there is other than the economy, sort of having people pause here, but are they kind of waiting for how AI scales and structure they don't want to make a move ahead of that, or am I reading too much into that?

No, so I'll take that one, Richard. So here's what I've observed. As it relates to the selling motion, the area that's most elongated happens after you've been selected. It's sort of the contractual negotiation portion is what has been much more protracted, often going for months before getting signatures. The other area of scrutiny, and I have a belief that this may be infused or induced by one of the larger analyst firms in the world suggesting that proof of concepts are becoming part of the norm of every single sales cycle, no matter what, and that is creating some elongation as well. And again, I think a lot of that is coming from the AI kind of promise. Sounds fantastical. But show me before I lay down some dollars, show me, show me proof. And so those are the areas that we're seeing. I don't see necessarily a curbing of that effect in 2025 or beyond. I think that is becoming part of the norm, and it's becoming part of the selling motion, I suspect, not only for us, but for a lot of software companies that are talking about the potency of AI and the promise of AI. Before spending dollars, it's like, okay, sounds fantastical, prove it. So I think those are the drivers, Richard, and I think that they won't subside anytime soon.

Yeah, I would add to it that if you look at our performance and some of the metrics that we've evaluated over the last few months, we're closing the best brands in the world. We're closing deals with the companies that are treating supply chain as the strategic asset inside their company. One of the complexities of the closed time is it's so important, and AI is becoming a parameter of choice, that there's expanded decision making. CEOs get involved. The COO, the CFO are getting more and more integrated in that decision making, because this is best for your business stuff. But the companies that we're closing that are absolutely growing market share, being a new innovator, we had a couple in the quarter, are very quickly coming onto the Conaxis platform. And that thing that John was just talking about is really exaggerated in the largest enterprise customers. Because when you make a decision to buy supply chain in a global company, it's a one-way trip. The neat thing about our category is that once a customer signs with Conaxis, they stay with Conaxis. And again, our differentiation is that the products work. They go in. We got the best partners in the world. But there is definitely a lot more scrutiny in those largest companies in And that's the biggest differentiation from how we were operating before. It's with those large customers.

Okay, super helpful. Thanks, guys, and all the best, John.

Thank

you.

Our next call comes, or excuse me, our next question comes from the line of Paul Treber of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thanks so much, and good morning. Just the first question, just for Bob, you've managed very large enterprise software, Salesforce in the past, you've been on the board of Conaxis for a number of years. Have you seen, or would you attribute any Salesforce execution or sales-related strategic missteps as a driver of the slower growth here, or is it, it sounds like what you're saying is, is it mostly or entirely externally related? Um,

first of all, the first of all, the way I look at it is that if I look the last two years first, the thing that we're trying to do with management and the board is to is to take a company that's 500 million and become a $1 billion company. And to do that, as I said earlier, there's a whole bunch of things you do as a software company to get there, to get that scale. And I feel like we, we've done a lot of them, you know, the partnerships with SIs, the focus on, you know, moving to public cloud, the opportunity to think about, you know, driving an AI strategy first in the industry, great pickup. These are things that we've done over the last couple of years that drive scale. The whole -to-market strategy has been really about broad scale globally. And the work that we've done in the last, you know, few months is to double down on our strength. So create market share in the categories that we already have advantage and we think there's still a lot of time. And really the thing we're doing going into next year is to repurpose people around that strategy. And that includes our -to-market capability, meaning that, you know, how we set up territories, the kind of talent we want to apply to that, really bringing people into the company that really understand this new complex selling. And so that's how I'm thinking about it. We've covered a lot of ground. We've got a higher win rate. We're creating market share, both, you know, directly with respect to TAM, but also with the SIs. We have an unbelievable reference base and customer satisfaction. And now we've got to take advantage of those things. And that's kind of how we're driving forward. And the benefit of that is the win rate we enjoy now and the, you know, two times, we've pretty well doubled the number of customers that we have in the last couple of three years. And so the metrics aren't bad. What we've got to do now is take advantage of the position of the marketplace. And that's where Mark Morgan comes in. He gets this industry. He's, you know, when we did our assessment of Mark, I talked to customers, I talked to the partners, I talked to the influencers in the industry. His followership is going to be unbelievable. And he's already brought a couple of people into the company. And there's a lot looking to join the company. So I would say that the one thing that, you know, we might not have anticipated is the importance of supply chain with the largest customers in the world against the backdrop of them being careful in the way they procure. That's been the gap. And we even want to get organized around that as we go forward.

Thanks. Secondly, for John, you know, best of luck in the future. You know, being at the company for 30 years, you know, it gives you a really long term perspective. And I'm sure you've seen, you know, ebbs and flows in the past. And looking at where we are right now, you know, going through a little period of slower growth, you sound very bullish on the opportunity. Can you sort of relay or express, you know, comparatively how it was in the past and the bullishness where you are on the company's prospects here?

You know, absolutely. Look, you know, supply chain as a practice, supply chain as a competence is the operating system of humanity. It's not a nice to have. It is a requirement for a fully functioning, successful society to exist. And I absolutely see the industry at a pivotal moment, perhaps caused by a global pandemic and people realizing that their mad obsession for accuracy was at the expense of agility. And there's a realization that successful supply chains for society require both. And I think, you know, there's so we are, I think at a very pivotal moment, I call it a renaissance. And some people laugh when I use that word, but it's a rebirth of the craft. Now, these things don't happen overnight. People have asked me what's the likelihood that everybody adopts, you know, concurrency and automation and resilience. 100%. I just can't tell you exactly when and, you know, what the uptake will be. Now, obviously, we've doubled the number of customers inside of a two to three year period and we're starting to see that adoption even from some of the smallest and some of the very largest companies that do hundreds of billions in revenue are all recognizing that. And that's causing my confidence, at very least in the approach and the techniques that we've invented here at CanAxis. I'll call it the new AI infusion to this equation. It carries a tremendous amount of promise. You know, the notion of artificial intelligence applied to supply chain is going to drive automation. You know, intelligent automation. And I think that when you apply that to the overall solution, that's what's going to ultimately build resilience. So that's driving my confidence. And certainly, you know, adding Mark Morgan here into the equation. Listen, I spent probably the longest amount of hours with him prior to this election. He was my first pick. And I'm thrilled that we were his first pick. And so I think he's going to have a pronounced impact on our growth as well.

Thanks for taking the questions. Thanks, Paul.

Our next question comes from the line of Doug Taylor from Conaccord Unuity. Your line's open.

Yeah, thank you for taking my questions. I'm going to drill down from some of the bigger picture questions that have been answered so far and talk about, you know, the guidance for this year and what you're signaling with that. It remains a pretty wide range given how late we are in the year. And so I just want to understand the implications for Q4 as the midpoint would suggest an uptick in the overall growth profile, while a similar profile to what we've seen over the last couple of quarters would suggest a lower end of the range. So my question is whether the mid or high end of the range is an achievable target still for this year and whether there's something you're seeing in the market that supports that.

Sure, I'll take that, Doug. Obviously, you're focusing on total revenue, which is obviously one of the key areas and has a large range at this stage. 43 to 495 is what we've been consistently saying from the beginning of the year and we're continuing to say that at this stage. In Q2, I did make a mention of we'd be at the lower end of that range and I would say that's still consistent with what our thoughts are at this stage. There's always things that can change that, though, and we see that things that are sometimes outside of our control, such as foreign exchange rates. And then there's other things that are completely in our control, which at this stage now is professional services, which is again, continue to be a very high demand area, but we're actually in control about how that growth is going as we continue to leverage off of what we have from our partners. And we're doing that more and more at this stage, which is partially why we're seeing an increase in our margins going all the way up to 32% for professional services. The one other key thing that can throw off our numbers and have a big upside is this description term license came in much higher than we expected. That can always be a last second change in a contract, especially for customers who want a hybrid contract where they want the option of on-prem. And that's particularly why we have such a wide range at this stage.

That's great, Keller. Thanks for clarifying. Blaine, while I've got you, I think you mentioned in your prepared remarks the SAPS4 HANA migrations being a benefit and not a headwind in some aspect of the pipeline in the near term, despite us hearing over the last couple quarters some delays to roll outs related to the HANA migration. I just want you to, if I could get you to clarify your comments there and maybe expand on that and what you're seeing.

Yeah, so number one, we love that there's a SAPS4 HANA migration. We've seen our win rates against SAP in particular go up as a result, and they are included in that over 60% win rate against our three core competitors. On the other hand, they're a pain in the butt because it does take a little bit longer to those deals through because there is a lot more forward input on these massive transformations that are going through. It's trying to figure out the resources that are available to ensure that it's not only deploying SAPS4 HANA but also the Kanax solution. So it creates a longer sale cycle, but again, it's given us more opportunities, more wins against a very key competitor against us, and I will welcome any S5 HANA migration that they might have in the future. But I'll even add in, we're always lucky to have someone who led a sales force at SAP. So Bob, I want you to add some comments. The only thing I'd

say is in these large enterprise companies, part of the challenge is what Blaine describes is the idea of transformation. Our biggest competitor is DoNothing, because, and particularly around SAP, a lot of the doubling of the number of customers, the predominant customer type is one that's innovative, that sees supply chain as strategic. The alternative is DoNothing, and the S4 HANA upgrade is going to cause the DoNothing clients to have to consider alternatives, and when they consider alternatives, we'll win. That's how this is going to play out over the next couple of years, because we can, these customers that are very careful know that we have the solutions with the highest customer satisfaction, the products go in, and they're the least risky alternative. And so that's why that whole opportunity over the next couple of years is significant for Kanax.

Okay, thank you. Last question for me, and I guess this could be for anyone. If we wind back the clock to the Maestro announcement a couple months ago, I think you'd laid out a couple of different horizons as to the generative AI roadmap and the business model that you had supporting it. Can you give us an update on where you sit with fleshing out those, you know, the revenue model for some of the gen AI products you're hoping to bring on and the milestones we should expect here in the near and medium term?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, first, you know, we're quite proud of our rapid progress here on our AI journey, and we announced at the event, first, our Maestro gen AI chat agent, which we seeded the market with, okay, and we've got well over 100 customers now already actively leveraging that technology. And anybody who's ever used that kind of technology, they know it's kind of addictive, actually. And so we've seeded our customer base with that usage while we're simultaneously moving towards our next layer, you know, and the future layers, which will all be monetized. The next layer is having AI conversations with your data. Right now, when you use, say, chat GBT, you're often having conversations with text documents. The future of this technology is to have conversations with your data, which is a giant leap forward, and also to have this technology generate content for you, right, to have gen AI be a creator for you. And these are the areas that we're investing in now, and there'll be, you know, future releases, which will get monetized, you know, for all those that are currently using the chat agent now. Ultimately, and the holy grail is to have the agent become essentially your copilot in decision making and automatically automating, you know, what I described in supply chain anyway, the ability to automate 80% of the obvious transactions should be hands free without human intervention. And you can only do that if you have an AI technology that sits on top of an entirely concurrent system. You cannot create an automation of a transaction without predetermination of whether it's safe on either side. You know, what does it do to customer sat? What does it do to distribution and downstream? So, so that's where our AI technology is that we look forward to our next connections, which was which will be earlier in 2025, and we'll be showcasing some some new stuff there. And Doug, maybe I'll

even add on to that. Because you said revenue, I like revenue. One of the things that we were in meetings, obviously, the last couple days, and our chief product officer, start talking about the timeline of when we're expecting what we'll call phase two and phase three of gen AI and when it's going to be ready for market. And I think people will realize that it's coming sooner than they think. In fact, the targets they've set, they've already set for phase two, it's ahead of our forecast. So I'm pretty excited about when I started getting that revenue. And we'll see how 2025 looks with some of those opportunities in our forecast.

All right. Thank you, Blaine. And thanks, John, for your insights. And I'll echo everyone else's congratulations on your upcoming transition to what I guess will be the next phase of your contributions to this organization. Thank you

so much, Doug. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Lachlan Brown from Redburn Atlantic. Please go ahead.

Hi, all. Thanks for the question. The ACV over AR 1.23 year to date, that was up from the first half. Was it driven by one large dining or was it more floor-based? And just on the phase two, I think it's a little hard

to understand you, but Blaine will do his best.

I will. So ACV AR, you asked a question about the ratio getting to 1.23. And that was a pretty big jump, we saw it again in Q3 after some big jumps we've seen over the previous quarters. We were at 1.18 at the end of Q2 and again only two years ago, 1.08, and the year before that, 1.04. So we are seeing a lot more rent deals. And it's not just one or two. It is a significant amount of deals that are asking for this that just gets in line with how they think about their budget constraints in the near term and the usage of our solution over a longer period of time. It's hard to say is it just one application or modules. It is numerous things that are happening. It is the number of users they want to roll out over time. There are specific modules like demand.ai and splat.ai that are starting to get a lot of attention at this stage and are being put into the back end of some of these contracts. I'm always hopeful that those timelines get moved forward as we move ahead. But at this stage, yeah, we are seeing a lot more activity around rent deals. But I would say it's across the board. They're looking at all of our modules and applications as well as our users and growing that.

I think that's very clear. Thanks. And just on the professional services margin, you previously talked about these reverting. But they've been first over the year. Obviously, that's a great outcome. But how can you think about these margins going forward? Is 30% the right way to think about this?

Yeah. When we started the year, I had a target for them. They're exceeding their target. As soon as you get closer and closer to a number, I think we're at 20.7. As soon as you get closer at 30%, I started saying, hey, we can hit 30%. And so I like the fact that we have a very strong pricing power right now. And I want to make sure that we utilize that pricing power to the maximum that we can. And the next milestone is 30%. If people want to keep paying us for that amounts versus using our partners, we'll take that. But we want to utilize our pricing power as much as we can in the near term.

That's clear. And if it's all right, I might just ask the last one. Fourth quarter normally is seasonally hard for this quarter. I know it's early days, but any color of what you've seen in October and the pipeline having the next two months? And just any color of what you think about any luckiness of renewals in the quarter?

Thanks. Yeah. Q4 is always a bigger quarter for renewal. So I won't really get too much into the details, but it's usually a higher renewal quarter. As far as talking about the quarter so far, we're not going to talk about how Q4 is going. Obviously, you're right. It is a bigger quarter generally for us.

Okay. That's clear.

Thank you. This concludes our Q&A section. I'm going to turn the call back over to Rick Wadsworth.

Thanks, operator. For those of you who didn't get around asking your questions, we'll follow up with you immediately after the call. We do have a hard stop now. So thank you, Elporn, as always for participating. Appreciate your questions and your interest in CanAxis. We look forward to speaking with you again when we report fourth quarter and year end results. Bye for now.

Thank you all for joining. This concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.