SoftwareOne Holding AG (SWON) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Chiara Mantovani from Investor Relations. Anna Engvall, our Head of Investor Relations, unfortunately, is not here with us today in Zurich. So it's my pleasure to give you a very warm welcome here in the webcast and online on site in Zurich. Before we begin, I invite you to please take a moment to review the disclaimer regards to forward-looking statements for non-IFRS measures. So now let's run through the agenda. The event will begin with Brian Duffy, our CEO, who will present our new strategy called Vision 2026 after a brief overview of our 2023 full year results. After Brian, we will have Bernd Schlotter, our President, Software and Cloud who will review the portfolio, platform and delivery model. We will then continue with Rohit Nagarajan, our new Chief Revenue Officer, who will share his first impressions since joining and provide insight as to how we increase customer impact. After a short coffee break, our Chief HR Officer, Julia Braun, will talk about our diverse talent base. She will be followed by our CFO, Rodolfo Savitzky, and he will be giving details on Q4 and full year 2023 results. Rodolfo will also discuss how our strategy translates into Vision 2026 financial plan and targets. We will conclude the event with a Q&A with each of the presenters on stage. People will be able to ask questions in the room as well as online. Finally, we will wrap up the event with an [indiscernible] altogether. So thank you very much for being here in Zurich, and on the webcast, and it's my great pleasure to introduce our CEO, Brian Duffy.

Thank you. Well, thank you, Chiara, and thank you, everybody, for joining us here in Zurich. I'm thrilled that we have our Capital Markets Day 2024, where we get to share with you a little bit about Vision 2026 that we have as an organization. In addition to hearing from me, as Chiara said, you're also going to get to hear from our entire Executive Board as well. And our mission as a team today is to explain how we will drive growth acceleration for SoftwareOne and margin expansion and how we will ultimately maximize shareholder returns and allowing SoftwareOne to truly reach its full potential. Now in terms of an agenda, I will be kicking off spending a few minutes naturally on 2023 results, followed by where we stand today as an organization, what changes I've introduced over the last 9 months, I have been here 9 months since joining. And how we now have, what I will say is really and truly a solid foundation to execute on our Vision 2026. Now before we dive into the 2023 results, I did actually want to share with you the key takeaways, and there are 5 of them. Firstly, as an organization, SoftwareOne is in a unique position because we have a massive market opportunity for us to go after. Our next chapter is driven by a new leadership team that we have in place to go after that market. We're going to focus on leveraging our lead business which we'll talk a bit later, and at the same time, expanding into new high-growth markets as well, but we're going to do all of this with one very important thing, which has sharpened, my favorite word, execution across our entire go-to-market strategy, which Rohit will touch on later. And then finally, for Vision 2026, I can say with confidence that we are strongly positioned to drive profitable growth and shareholder value at the same time. Now specifically, in terms of our 2023 results, we delivered solid results in line with guidance. We had revenue, which was up 8% and margin at 24.3%. EMEA, which is 61% of our business still delivered a solid year. APAC, as you see, continue to accelerate, approaching 25%, and it's been that consistent behavior all year long against a solid execution. And in NORAM, we saw softer performance. But again, as you know, that's something that we messaged earlier in the year and it was anticipated. In Latin America, we saw a stabilization of the business in terms of our performance with revenue in Q4, up 4%. And all of that was on the back of a leadership change that we had in Latin America. And at the same time, leadership changes in Mexico and Colombia. All of this then led to an adjusted EBITDA growing at 6.4%, which was driven by an outperformance in terms of operational excellence, and that ultimately drove our margin to 24.3%. Now before we get into Vision 2026, what I wanted to share with you always a little about who SoftwareOne is, and what we actually do. And I've been asking that question a lot over the last 9 months. Our value proposition as an organization is to support clients ultimately on their digital transformation journeys. And we do this by providing integrated solutions to drive business outcomes for our customers. We are a global organization. We have north of 65,000 customers across the entire world. We're operating in 63 countries, and that scale in our business is extremely important. And in total, we have 7,500 partners that we support every single day. But everything that we do is because of the amazing tapestry of talent that we have woven as an organization and we have 9,300 employees across the entire world, and that includes over 400 graduates from our Academy. Now our employees are extremely important, and there's one topic that they're very passionate about which is sustainability. And we remain focused on delivering our 2030 sustainability goals as an organization. We are going to be net zero for Scope 1 and 2 by 2030. We are also focused on helping clients at the same time, reduce their carbon footprint. And we have recently signed up to science-based targets initiative, which is an important step in our carbon reduction journey. At the same time, we've aligned our executive compensation tied to these goals, and we are all fully focused on delivering our climate commitments and at the same time, our social responsibility. Now I have said before that the pace of change in the world has never been this fast, but at the same time, the pace is never going to be this slow again. We, as an organization, are operating in a market that is changing rapidly. It's highly dynamic, and we're supported by a lot of mega trends that are in our favor. The opportunity that we have ahead of us is massive. Organizations are continuing to prioritize investments in the cloud, and there's a long run way to go. I say that because only 30% of workloads are actually already in the cloud. So there's an incredible amount that still needs to move in that direction. Cloud journeys are great, yes. But at the same time, they bring a lot of complexity and they bring a lot of challenges with them, which is where we come in. Multi-cloud, so operating on many hyperscalers or hybrid cloud environments are the norm today. And again, they bring complexity. And for 80% of companies throughout the world, actually, their top priority as an organization is overall spend. And that's actually overtaken security as a top concern. And that is again where we come in. Demand for data and AI is exploding, 70% organizations now have at least 1 POC operating in their data and AI space. And finally and very importantly for us, organizations actually don't have the talent to support all of these initiatives. Now all of these pain points for customers, ultimately, for us as an organization, translate into a significant opportunity for us to go after. We are operating, as I said, in a fast pace, growing market. And then when you look at the SAM that you see here behind me, that's a SAM for marketplace and services, and it's going to be growing to $150 billion by 2026. It's currently at $90 billion. But part of the opportunity that we have is to actually unlock that and we can do that through our client portal, which Bernd is going to be talking about later. But net-net, what I would stress is mega trends are clearly showing there's a lot to do. The SAM is showing that there is a massive market for us to go after as an organization. Now what I wanted to do today, firstly, was I wanted to lay out our actual segmentation. This is something that I think you haven't seen before. And this clearly shows the relevance of our portfolio to all customers. So as you see, we operate from small all the way to large enterprise. But clearly, what you can see from the revenue mix and the number of customers is that our sweet spot is in corporate and SME that's very, very obvious. But similarly, when it comes to diversification, our revenue mix is now truly diversified. 54% of our revenue is coming from services. And from a geographical perspective, I shared with you that EMEA is our largest region, which does around 61% of our revenue every year. APAC has been, as I said, on a growth trajectory. And later on today, Rohit is going to share with you a little more around the growth opportunities we have in other geographies. And then finally, as you can see on the your right-hand side, clearly, the industry perspective, we are heavily diversified as well. So as I said, we have this massive opportunity for us to go after, and we are confident that we can capture this market opportunity build on our own unique strengths as an organization. So let's talk a little bit about what those actual strengths are. So firstly, we have unparalleled global presence. And as I said, that's extremely important in our business. It offers us the ability to support our partners and allows us to serve multinationals across the entire world. We have a large and rich diverse client base. And again, what that allows is the opportunity to cross-sell and upsell into all of those customers. We have world-class advisory capabilities, which we have done from the day we started. And we have certifications across every single one of the hyperscalers. We have, very importantly, unique customer insights that we're sitting on top of. We can tell you on those customers you saw on the pyramid, what they bought, when they bought it, how much they paid, how happy they are, when it's up for renewal. We have all of this data, which unlocks a massive potential for us and the ability to partner with our ISVs in terms of opportunities as well. And finally, we have a diverse, qualified talent base with over 5,000 cloud certifications in total. Now as we embark on Vision 2026, 2023 was critical in terms of laying the foundation for us as an organization. So to make sure that we had the right foundation in place. And after joining in May of last year, I made a number of key hires and changes within the organization to support us moving forward. And in addition, given that customers, as you've all heard, are focused on outcomes, we took our services business and our marketplace business, combine them together under the leadership of Bernd, who you'll hear from later, but ultimately, if our customers are concerned about outcomes, then we should go to market with one organization together. We've strengthened our execution capabilities through operational excellence, as you've all heard, and we have, as you know, delivered very well ahead of plan in regards to that. We've delivered a lot of large-scale customer wins, and we're going to continue to do that. And at the same time, we've enhanced our hyperscaler partnerships and we have a deep relationship with all 3 of them, which has been a personal project of mine. Now I mentioned there that we had hired new leaders. And ultimately, in order to go after the opportunity that's ahead of us, we need to have the right team. And I can say we're confident that we have now established a world-class team and a best-in-class team for us to capitalize on the massive opportunity that is ahead of us. So I'll just call out the new hires. Firstly, Rohit Nagarajan, who is our President and Chief Revenue Officer. He came from SAP, where he was the President of Northern Europe, had spent time at IBM and Oracle. Brad Berry, who is our Chief Partner and Strategy Officer. Brad joins us from Cognizant. Stephan Timme, who is our new President of DACH, who comes from SAP, where he ran a very large services business. Sonia Caso, who had been based in Spain for SoftwareOne. We have now relocated her, and she's happily living in Mexico, running our Latin American business. Susanna, who is now a EEB member and our Chief Marketing Officer. And then finally, Nazir, who has now joined us as our CIO. This team behind me is a team that is going to make everything possible for us, and what I can tell you is that we are all here to capitalize on the market opportunity and ultimately to win as an organization. I firmly believe that people ultimately are at the heart of all businesses, and people and relationships are also very important when it comes to partnerships. And as you can see behind me, we have some quotes. And since I joined, I have been hyper-focused on building key relationships with the ecosystem, not only existing ones that we have and taking them to another level, but at the same time building new marquee market-making relationships that we can go after. And I think the quotes that you can see behind me represent, one, the opportunity; and secondly, the belief that our partners have in us as an organization as well. Now as we pivot to Vision 2026. How are we ultimately going to drive a chapter of profitable growth and cash generation to maximize shareholder value? So let me share with you a little story, which is SoftwareOne was obviously founded in 1992 in Switzerland. We started with very humble beginnings. But one thing that was very clear from the beginning was that we recognize the importance of trust. People buy from organizations that they trust. People buy from people that they trust. And that trust is something that we all earn with each other and with the organization in drops. However, it's also very easy to lose that trust in bucket loads. We, as an organization, became a pioneer of reselling. We operated at scale, as you saw, across the entire world in terms of geography and customer count. Customers trusted in us because we were there to support them when they needed us and where they needed us around the world. Reselling opened up a world of opportunities for all of those customers because if they didn't have us, they literally wouldn't have the technology that they do in all corners of the world. At the same time, reselling opened up a world of opportunities for us at SoftwareOne. And in order to seize all of those opportunities, we had to evolve our business. So at the outset, we focused on advisory services. Then we started to add more and more value-added services. And the culture of evolution, I will tell you, is very much in the DNA of SoftwareOne. And as an organization, I find that we can pivot and move very, very quickly. And today, in 2024, we continue to evolve even more so. And we need to evolve because as we know, customers are now focused on outcomes. So I'm very happy to share with you today the updated strategy that we have as an organization, which ultimately is a continuation of our continuous evolution as an organization to best serve our customers when they need us and where they need us. So what we are doing is building on our core competencies as an organization and leveraging that, which actually separates us from everybody else. We have the scale. We have the ISV footprint. As I told you, we have a huge amount of customer insights and all of this is built on top of the trust that we, as an organization, have with 65,000 customers across the entire world. So moving forward, what we will do as an organization is continue to lead in certain areas, and then we will expand in other areas. So we will stay true to our DNA, and we will continue to lead in providing customers access to technology and support when they need it and where they need us. At the same time, we're going to continue to lead when it comes to maximizing that ROI for every customer in the world. And I will tell you this, we are best in class at doing this across the entire world. At the same time, as you all know, we're one of Microsoft's largest resellers in the entire world. And we have a rich practice around Microsoft, and we will continue to lead when it comes to all of our Microsoft offerings related to workforce productivity. However, we're now in a position where we can look at where else can we go. And the opportunity for us is to expand into 2 fast-growing segments. So firstly, as I told you, there's a lot of customers who are continuing to move to the cloud. They can move to the cloud to run more efficiently, but the real trick here is to move to the cloud, run more efficiently and actually change your business processes. And that is where we, as an organization, come in to help our customers. Secondly, data and AI. As I said, 70% of customers have at least 1 POC running when it comes to data and AI, and every single customer around the world wants to embrace AI. But the challenge for them is how are they going to do it and where do they get started. And that is where we, as an organization, come in. I firmly believe with the 65,000 customers that we have, it is our not only right, but it is our obligated to start having the conversations with our customers around how we can help them run more efficiently, how we can help them run smarter, and how ultimately we can help them bend the curve of productivity within their organization. And because we're on data and AI. And as I said, we have a massive Microsoft business, I do want to share with you that we have 12.5 million users that sit on Microsoft that we support. The opportunity for us is to go after supporting all of those 12.5 million users and bringing Copilot to each and every one of them. Now as we look at the segmentation, again, what I wanted to highlight is where are we going after this. And as you can see, we're going to continue our lead offerings across the entire segment they are relevant to all customers in those segments. We serve the enterprise extremely well on everything that you can see in green. And then the opportunity for us is now to expand our services they see in purple, so data and AI, accelerating the cloud journey and where will we do this? We'll do this across the corporate and SME space specifically. At the same time, what we will do with an organization is, we will completely mobilize around our new Vision 2026 from a services perspective, from a go-to-market perspective, and we will execute that as a team. But now let me focus on how we're actually going to win going forward through sharpened execution and building on our existing strengths. So what we have done is we identified 4 key strategic pillars, which I firmly believe are going to be explained in detail by my colleagues later but I want to share with you at a high level what those are. So firstly, a transformed go-to-market, and our new go-to-market strategy that Rohit will explain later is going to result in commercial excellence with a fully integrated sales force moving forward. We're going to develop alliances with our ISVs and our partners and take those relationships to new levels. We will do that with Rohit, and with Brad, our Chief Strategy and Partner Officer, because that's going to unlock a massive opportunity in terms of cross-sell and upsell for us. Then from a portfolio innovation perspective, we will innovate to deliver productized and modularized offerings moving forward. And the portfolio is going to be focused on providing outcomes to our customers. This all means that we will make tough decisions in terms of business that we will do and business that we won't do, and we will be operating against that Vision 2026 moving forward. Obviously, we're going to be focused as Bernd is in terms of delivery excellence and leveraging that to the maximum for us. And then finally, our talent ecosystem that we have as an organization. We will continue to build on our exceptional talent base by focusing on continuously upskilling all of our talent to ensure that we can meet the business needs of our customers. Now leveraging these unique strengths, we're going to pursue 5 key priorities for us moving forward, which is deepening our partnerships with the hyperscalers. As you know, driving global Microsoft Copilot adoption. We will capitalize on data and AI. We're going to focus on our ISV strategy and the key partners for us. And then finally, we're going to leverage the marketplace platform that Bernd will talk about later as well. All of this coming together is what's going to allow us to deliver on our Vision 2026. And I firmly believe that now in 2024, we have the clarity in terms of our vision, we have made some tough decisions internally as to what we will do, what we won't do. And most importantly, we have a leadership team that is going to allow us to go after this opportunity. And as you know, our Vision 2026 will lead us to a point where we have mid-teens growth and EBITDA margin, which will be approaching 28% and an unchanged dividend policy as well. So now with all of that, I'm going to turn it over to my colleagues who will walk you through that how are we going to do this for their relevant part of the business, and I will turn it over to Bernd.

Thank you, Brian. Good afternoon. I appreciate you spending your afternoon with us. I'll talk a bit about the virtuous cycle of our portfolio representation. I'll talk about the growth priorities, how we make them happen. I give you customer examples. And then last but not least, I'll talk about the client portal and the larger marketplace platform and how we are going to automate the business and get more access to a faster growing segment of the marketplace. So first, come back to our core, to our history, the drivers for the -- our right to win. So as Brian mentioned, we have 65,000-plus strong client base. We have insights about those customers. We know the tech stack they're running on. We can predict with machine learning when they are likely to migrate workloads to the cloud. We can predict when they are in a place where they can relicense their application estate. And so we can approach them proactively with a value proposition of quick to cash and then investment into a longer-term journey. As Brian said, these 3 segments of our [indiscernible] are our core where we come from, they play together, they reinforce each other and they make us unique. Unique, because we're the only ones who help you make and buy. Many systems integrators come and they say, well, you have to rewrite the application because they can't relicense it for you. We can. We are neutral. We can do for our customers the whole end-to-end chain and therefore, we have more credibility because sometimes it's okay to just relicense and not invest in refactoring the application. So simplifying cloud access and support, reinforced by maximizing ROI on your investment. And then as Brian said, we are with the 12.5 million seats, one of the premier providers of services around enhancing workforce productivity and now we'll be reinforcing that with Copilot. So what do we sell? A lot more, of course. We have a broad portfolio, but you can essentially bring it back into 3 things in each category and say, okay, we can buy all your software and the cloud consumption that you need. You can migrate with us to the cloud. And you can manage your cloud estate, your cloud operations. As you know, the shortage of skills in the market. So we are happy to jump in and help you manage your estate. Maximizing our software and cloud spend, if there is one super power that we are allowed to pick in the age of super powers, it's that one. We can help you lower your software and cloud cost through relicensing, for example that very often pays for the cloud journey afterwards. We can manage your application portfolio. We are very strong in application portfolio management, IT asset management. And then last but not least, internally, we can have you manage the madness of the marketing person who has the credit card, of the program of Vista credit card, who buy consumption all over the place through FinOps, through governance, making sure that internally you manage your cloud costs the same way that we help you manage it externally with the hyperscalers and ISV. And then on the productivity side the landing motion clearly is our relationship with Microsoft, how we bring Office 365, but then there is security. There is backup. There's a Unified Communications as a Service. There's a whole slew of security features around it, and now Copilot that make us unique and that link us to our customers in a very sticky way. That power from the 3 green pieces of the circle, we then use to earn the right to expand. Stand-alone, it probably doesn't happen as often that we start engaging on the cloud journey itself for data and AI with customers. It usually happens coming from the green. We earn the right, we earn the trust and then customers ask us to do more. It could be application development. It could be DevOps, security, managed services around the applications. It can also be AI beyond, just GenAI data and AI is a large issue for most corporate, and small and medium enterprise customers, if you can't increase the quality of your data, if you can't do data engineering, you cannot do many use cases in AI. These are big problems, practical problems that customers are looking to us to solve them for them. So let me give you one example. I know this is an eye chart, but it's actually one of my favorite charts because it shows the richness of a client relationship that we are developing in the corporate market. We have the scale. We have the credibility. As Brian said, it starts with advisory, our super power. In this case, a real example of financial services in the Americas, it started with workplace Advisory. Not very super exciting, but an entry, then it says, okay, we can help you manage your IT assets. So that proved so much value that they bought a managed service. So we do it on an ongoing basis for them. We manage the IT assets. We then found out that some of the major large ISVs could be relicensed. If you spend 15 million with a certain database supplier, and you can relicense it and you can save 7 figures, then you can pay for the migration journey afterwards. That is one of our super parts. That's what we do. We deliver ROI very early on in the journey and then convince the customer, the core investor savings into the long term. That's what happened here. So the middle stream here then is application modernization, several waves in that even in native cloud-up development, which is nascent for us, but something we can do. And then as always, we hope it ends in the managed service. And then at the bottom, you see from the workplace advisory, we ended up in workplace migration on-prem to the cloud, adopt and change management in the cloud, security features, backup also and then last but not least, unified communications. So this is 3 years of a client relationship. It is more and more typical that in the corporate and larger SME market, so up to 5 billion in revenue that we develop these kind of customer relationships. And they're very, very sticky, as you can tell, once in a managed service, once you do the managed service on the commercial side with ITM or on the application side, you are very hard to displace. And the customer is happy there is no reason to replace it. So with that the application of our portfolio, how it all comes together. Let me go into the 5 growth priorities that Brian laid out. Number one, deepening our relationship with hyperscaler. It's not just the imperative of deepening, it's also transforming it. Hyperscalers a few years ago would pay us for pure consumption contracts. It could be an EDP it could be an EA on Microsoft, and it was kind of like a bounty. If they took the customer direct, you would get a fee for having sold the right to consume or the licenses, and that was the end of it. And that was the nature of a large part of the relationship. It still exists today, but now the discussions are much more strategic. Now the discussions are, okay, if we co-invest, let's do it in areas that matter to our joint customers, and let's do it where our 2 priorities match. So this is a summary of all 3 relationships that we have. So we do, for example, a dedicated that's more media enterprise center of excellence with focused leadership to drive our share in that market with one of the hyperscalers. We have a GenAI center of excellence together with AWS, and we have been selected as the first prototyping partner for AI solutions for AWS. That means it's a joint approach, jointly with the customer to in days and weeks and not months prove out the value of GenAI use case. Fast-tracking data in AI, we do it not just for Copilot. We'll go to that in detail. We do it AWS Bedrock. We do it on the Google platforms, and this is a core of the relationships that we'll have going forward with the hyperscalers. App migration and modernization matters a lot to our customers. Only 30% of the workloads are in the cloud. There's lots of work to be done. And also, usually, what happens, what we find out is you migrate and then some time later, you remigrate. So first, very often, it's a lift and shift. If a data center is closed, and then later on, you do actually application modernization. We can do that on the journey, and we're heavily investing with 2 of the hyperscalers on this motion. And then last but not least, on top of everybody's agenda is security, cybersecurity. And we have great capabilities but our hyperscaler partners are willing to coinvest with us so that we are able to scale those capabilities. Demand is by far outstripping our delivery capacity right now, and we're jointly investing to increase it. So it's a great story. It's at the heart of what we do. Given we're a $1 billion company, there's much larger fish out there. This gives us a lot more scale. This gives us a lot more oomph in the market, and also joint go-to-market with our hyperscaler partners that makes us much stronger than the $1 billion revenue would indicate. So coming back to the 12.5 million users, an adoption rate of 15%. You can do the math. It doesn't quite add up to $100 million if you factor in some discounted, but it's opened up a huge services opportunity. So together, relicensing, licensing, and services, we figure for us, it's a $100 million opportunity that we will reap over the next 2 to 3 years. Finally, enough, customers don't really come to us for the license. They do. We sell them the license. It's part of the offer we put together to look at their licensing scheme, since they're ready for AI. But most of the time, that's secondary. We have very large customers around Copilot implementations that don't buy the license from us. What they want is the [ 3 Rs ]. They don't know what the use cases are? How many of our employees? What kind of profile of the employee? What are they going to do with it? Can you teach them? It's a big change. And therefore, what is the ROI of investing in Copilot? What is the risk security-wise, intellectual property protection, our data that we going to teach the Internet and therefore, our competitors, what we do. And the third one around third-party integration, readiness, everything does it fit into our stack? Is there enough project and program management around it? These are the themes that we hear from a customer. And why should I tell you about it? Let's roll a video and have a customer speak for themselves. [Presentation]

Well, thank you to AAMI to collaborate with us. And I think it's remarkable, 30% of employees are deployed, the use cases. They have an ROI. They are tracking it. They knew they wanted to use it. They knew they wanted to innovate, but they didn't know the use cases. They didn't know what the adoption and change management would have to be. So Copilot for us is, of course, a licensing opportunity. But beyond that, it's a relationship building and a services opportunity of very large proportions. So let me go to then of the priority number 3, data and AI. And so left-hand side, a very big numbers to spend, will go up and GenAI, it will be an accelerator, further accelerator of cloud adoption. But it's not all about AI because in order to do AI, you need to do your transformation. You need to move to the cloud. You need to have the skills and capabilities in-house. So 8% of respondents in the CIO surveys say, "Well, we're done with transformation or close to it." And 93% more remarkable to say we don't have the skills in-house to take advantage of these opportunities, which for us is good news, right? We have the skills in-house, 6,000 strong in terms of marketplace and services. and we're happy to bring them to bear to help our customers drive their journey into the world of AI. But it's a very practical journey. So the 4 bubbles on the right show you how the conversation usually goes. Well, you have to really rationalize your estate because you have 1,000 island applications somewhere on an excel sheet. There is some data you need. That's not going to work. So you need to rationalize your U.S. state application performance portfolio management. Then you get to the cloud, continue your cloud journey. Then get your data in order, data quality, data engineering. And once you have that, let's talk about the use cases for AI. It's a very practical journey that resonates well in the corporate and in the SME market. We aligned against is what we call SoftwareOne heritance fabric. And you can enter this helix from either side. You can come from the right-hand side, as you saw with AAMI that adoption and change the user experience, how do we bring AI to our employees? How we help them to digest? Or you come from the left-hand side. What are the use cases? What kind of data do I need? How do I manage my data? How do I synthesize my data? And then design use cases and operate the use cases. So we're very excited. We have more than 80 data and AI projects in the second half of last year, 800 plus of our customers, infrastructure as our customers run data and AI workloads and the breadth of capabilities in our house aligns well to this offering. So we're very, very excited about this. So while this is obviously a mega trend, for us, just as big is on the ISV side. As Brian said before, opportunity number 4, right, let's make sure we cross-sell into our 65,000 customers. We are aligned behind the hyperscalers, we talk about how we deepen our relationship with them, but we work with amazing ISV vendors. They appreciate, as you saw on the quote from CrowdStrike, our global reach. They appreciate our expertise, our scale in markets where they are not very present. And so each of our countries has a subset of those as a priority. They know which infrastructure vendors they are going to cross-sell into our customer base. They know about security, whether it be Trend Micro or CrowdStrike, but we have a security center of excellence, we have people who understand the licensing schemes, who understand the business problems, who can help our sellers to license these products for our customers. So a very strong push for us. There's opportunity and Rohit is going to talk about this a lot more cross-selling into existing customers will be in the marketplace a big source of growth. And it's as you may know much easier to sell something as to a customer who knows and trust you, then finding a completely new customer and selling the same thing. And last but not least, the platform. Let's start from the bottoms up. So you heard about client portal. You heard about marketplace platform, where a client portal and vendor portal are on the same platform called Marketplace platform. It's the way to do business in the future with our partners, 7,500 of them. So a good reason to automate, and our customers, 65,000 of them. So we are pioneering an integrated way of facilitating vendors and customers coming together. But by the way, Software and Cloud Services is also a vendor. In the logic and the architecture of the platform, Software and Cloud Services is a supplier to our marketplace platform. So the logic works, the workflow works. We don't have to design 2 different platforms. It's 1 platform. Even though our services business and our marketplace businesses on top have different objectives. As you know, services, we are still building up. We are scaling. We're improving profitability. Margin expansion is very important. That drives a certain number of behaviors. We have made a lot of progress there. And of course, we need to make sure that quality and customer experience are up to benchmark at least. On the marketplace side, the is a bit different. It's much higher margin. We already have industry-leading margins. So maintaining those margins obviously is a priority, but a bigger priority is actually what we call win rate. So if you deliver a quote and they then get an order, we measure that ratio, order to quote, which we call win rate. And that's at a very high-margin product. That's the #1 predictor of growth and profitability, right? So different objectives on the same platform, automating workflows, consistent workflows, little complexity. And I have Max, our General Manager of our Marketplace platform in a minute talk about the platform in more detail. Before I go there, let me give you a bit of an update on the track record of scaling up the services business. So on the right-hand side, you see the results. So we have to show that we are delivering. And so the contribution margin, which is a measure for delivery efficiency, right, and also price realization has gone up from 36.9%, 90 basis point from '21 to '22, and more than 200 basis points from '22 to '23. So we're now at 40.2% gross margin, you could say that's in the range of industry benchmark. We think we can do better. But it's a proof that the services business is starting to stand on very solid legs because, as you know, contribution margin pays for selling overhead. And you have to be -- in order to be a viable business, you have to drive this up to 40%, that's an acceptable range. We think we can do better going forward by 2026, but it's a sign of the transformation is working. What do we do? Well, there's a whole lot of things we do. We had to have cost transparency. We had to separate price realization from delivery efficiency. We had to introduce standard costing for deal approvals and then consumption base costing to track the delivery efficiency. We have standardization, workflows, service catalogs, configurator -- and configuring side of customizing, all do all of these things, use AI and ML in some of our advisory businesses because machine learning matters, especially if you have a lot of data. And so then also now onboarding services as a vendor in Marketplace platform to retire our legacy services tools and get on to this modern platform of Marketplace. So a good story in the making. 2 years, 3 years in, there is more to come, but we feel we are on a very solid path to get also the EBITDA in the double digits and 2 industry benchmarks. So now to the platform. Very simplified. If we have 7,500 vendors on the left-hand side, they want to self-serve. The product manager on the vendor side will be able to get onto the platform. There will be -- there is a rule set. They'll be able to set up SKUs to sell. They were able to qualify where a product can be sold, under what terms and conditions. And then they will be able to manage price lists and other things. So that will -- is already for a lot of vendors, but that will be the way to do business. This is not the standard way of doing business today, right? There's a lot of phone calls between distributor or reseller and vendor. This will go away and it will go on to the platform. And then on the client side, this is the client portal we're talking about. Hyperscalers are driving a lot of traffic to marketplaces. This is not a competitor to example -- for example, to AWS Marketplace, it's a complement. So AWS allows you to burn down your AWS consumption. If you use our client portal and the marketplace for AWS. So it is a synergistic chain and is the new way of doing business. Its self-service in its capability, but it's also, to be honest, used internally by us. Whether you're a seller or a client, you're going to use or you are using, in many cases, already this So now I'll let Max who is the architect of our platform with a lot of experience in that area, walk you through a demo. And then afterwards, I give you some numbers to prove that this is not just [ slideware ].

Hello, everyone. Our Marketplace is a 2-sided online platform that facilitates transactions between our clients on the right side of this diagram, and vendors on the left side of this diagram. Marketplace platform was designed to be first, meaning that it prioritizes seamless integrations and flexibility with systems for both clients and vendors, which is only possible by building community of developers and system integrators. So platform provides SDK for integrations with systems of our vendors and clients as well as catalog to publish those extensions too. Let's start by looking at the vendor portal, sematically on the left side of this diagram. Vendor portal provides vendors with a way of efficient onboarding, self-service provisioning and billing automation as well as overall transparency and cost efficiency of relationship with SoftwareOne. In the vendor portal, vendors can manage different aspects of their relationship with SoftwareOne. They can look at their products and items, meaning those different SKUs that are available for sale. They can manage their price list in different regions and different aspects of relationship with SoftwareOne, authorizations that they made available for SoftwareOne, and send the listings of a product. When it comes to product management, vendors can manage products in a self-service way, they can manage different aspects of provisioning by defining parameters, and they can manage items of a product by defining the actual go-to-market structure of a product. On the client facing part of our platform, client portal helps with faster product discovery and of course, ordering experience through the marketplace with automated and faster provisioning of services and data feed for billing and reconciliation processes. Let's take a look at the client experience now. First of all, clients can easily discover products that are available for them for purchasing in their catalog. When looking at the specific product, they can check the documentation associated with the product, and they can see pricing in all the regions that are available for them. In the ordinary experience, they can use their existing relationships with vendors or they can initiate the new ones by either creating new accounts or importing accounts from one of the partners that they already have relationship with. In the process of buying platform automatically asks for all the data required by vendors as defined in the vendor portal like the main names, company names parameters that are required, and then guides users to the ordering experience. They first select items that are available for sale, and they can see all the efficient pricing with estimates for monthly and yearly charges. They can also then select optional add-ons like backup add-on in this example, where users can select from essential, advanced and premium support for their Microsoft service. And of course, the overall order estimate is updated with that. And customers are shown with optional add-ons that could be added based on the products that were selected previously. In the final screen of the order, clients can save this order for further purchasing or proceed with the immediate ordering. They get a chance to review all the SKUs that were added to the order with monthly and yearly estimates, and they place order, which immediately gets sent to the vendor for provisioning. Overall, our platform the end-to-end transparency to both vendors in clients and drives self-service product discovery and ordering experience. It also provides the consolidated view for IT and management of the company for consumption and billing purposes as well as dashboards for monitoring software consumption and spend. Thank you, and have a wonderful day.

Thank you very much. Next -- as you can hear from his accent and my accent, we're both located in California. We speak the native language. So we spent a lot of time together to make sure the architect is right. But I want to assure you, this is being used. And so the way we use it right now is internally, our sellers are using it and then our sellers are sitting down with customers showing it to them and encouraging them to use it. So as of now, this is only subscriptions. This is not yet the transactional volume that we're just ramping up. So for subscriptions, more than 500 million of gross volume is transacted over the platform. We use it internally. If you sign up for a subscription, it's going to be on the platform, the customer or the client will be able to use the platform. If we have established the ways we do business together, the pricing and everything they can use the platform. We have over 30,000 actual subscriptions that drive those $500 million, and we have 17,000 customers enabled. So are they active maybe to look at their bills, right? Or if they want to rebuy. But this is a subscription platform that automates data that comes from the hyperscaler, it meters the data and then makes it ready to go into the ERP system and the ERP system then will send out the invoice. So we're using this internally. We're pressure testing it. and we're scaling it up with customers. It's ready to use for customers for some of the high-volume subscriptions that we sell and gradually are going to start to onboard more and more and more of the vendors. So we will report on this progress every quarter. So we don't take this lightly. But if $500 million of software sales can already be transacted, then it must be working, right? And now it's a question of scaling it up and adding more volume to it. So let me give you the key takeaways, right? As you heard, we are uniquely positioned to deliver outcomes. We showed it on the customer example. We're integrating the licensing with services. You can have the licensing alone, services alone, but most powerfully, usually a combination of the two. We're well positioned to expand into data and AI and applications, cloud journey. The first to market with Copilot. You saw 30% of employees who are using it. We started the process when the product was announced. We got visibility already back in May in the product. We got to play around with it over the summer, even though it wasn't released yet. The tapping in the data and AI fueled by our hyperscaler partnerships. Again, alone, we don't have the scale, but with use cases together with the hyperscalers, we can do it. And last but not least, the transformation is in progress with all the things we're doing on the top line that we have to do. We cannot forget to do our homework. And the data I showed you on services shows that we are doing our homework, we're expanding our margin, and we are getting up to industry standards. With that, I call my new partner in crime, Rohit up to the stage to talk to you about go-to-market and the plans he has to drive our top line. Thank you.

Thank you, Bernd, and good afternoon, everyone. With over 65,000 customers that you heard several times over across the globe and the presence in over 60 countries, and ability to serve in over 100, I think SoftwareOne is probably one of the industry's best kept secrets. Now I've been here for slightly over 5 weeks. And I have to tell you that wherever I look, I'm amazed with the wealth of riches that this company possesses. The large and loyal customer base that you heard about, the stickiness of our solutions, which just show how central and core we are to our customers' operations. And importantly, the trust and privilege -- the privilege that we've got and the trust that we built with our customers in the over 2 decades of operations that we've been in business. Now we've been a trusted partner for our clients through multiple iterations and evolutions of their own digital journeys, as Brian pointed out, I mean, right from when they just won a couple of licenses of Microsoft through to win, they embarked on their cloud journey with Azure, whoever is. And now we're excited to partner with them in this new age of generative AI. And all of this clearly offers us a very rich and solid foundation for us as SoftwareOne to continue our growth journey. And as we look forward to the incredible opportunities that lie ahead of us, building a world-class go-to-market organization is central to capturing this opportunity. Now we are all very cognizant across the organization of what got us here with regards to our go-to-market capabilities is probably not optimal to get us to where we need to go to. And to do exactly that, we launched a go-to-market transformation that cuts across all aspects of what we sell, who we sell to, and how we sell with a clear objective of delivering this growth in a cost-efficient manner. So there are 3 fundamental pillars to our go-to-market transformation that we're driving. The first, how do we grow market share in geographies and segments like North America, where we're clearly under-indexed compared to the market opportunity? The second, how do we better run our current book of business to capture a larger share of wallet when you consider the sizable installed base that we are fortunate to possess and the stickiness of our solution? And thirdly, how do we execute all of this in a consistent manner across all regions so we can execute at scale, but while still delivering at the high quality of customer experience that we are known for? And to do this, we have identified these initiatives, which are a priority for us across each of those 3 pillars, and we have been executing on them with some pace since the beginning of this year. To be clear, for each of these initiatives, we've identified near-term, midterm and long-term goals, so we can start moving the needle and seeing some quick wins across the business. So let's look at a couple of examples for each of these initiatives. So let's start by looking at how we're going to transform our go-to-market model with a segmentation that we've initially introduced. So simplifying and standardizing our segmentation and coverage model is a cornerstone on which a lot of the rest rests. So you've heard from Brian, you've heard from Bernd, how our strategy now covers the key outcomes that we deliver for our customers. And what you can see here is with this new segmentation strategy that we're adopting, we're taking a more intentional approach on how we take this portfolio to market by layering this portfolio across our various segments based on what makes sense to who. So based on applicability, relevance and a right to win. At the same time, we're going to change how we execute this in the field through a differentiated and focused sales coverage model, not by being all things to all people, but by doing what is suited for every segment that we cover. So that means a no touch or a digital inside sales-driven motion for the small and medium enterprise, which is clearly supported by the client portal that we just saw. A low-touch coverage model with a combination of field sales and shared technical professionals for the corporate segments that lets us scale. And a high-touch model with a dedicated enterprise account team for our large enterprise customers. Now what that enables us to do is to take this rich portfolio that we have to each and every one of our customers in a consistent fashion, consistent with the opportunity that, that particular segment represents while at the same time, not compromising on customer experience. The second initiative that I'd like to cover is how we're looking to increase customer lifetime value through commercial excellence. And this is with a view of increasing our share of wallet that we have in our current installed base. Like you've heard several times over this afternoon, we have a massive book of business of recurring revenue that is reflective, like I said, of the stickiness of our business. And we've identified several levers to drive up our renewal rates even higher to best-in-class, specifically as it relates to the long tail of our business, which in turn, obviously, will have a positive impact on our NRR. Now many of these are not new. They have been piloted over the course of the last quarter. We've seen some brilliant results, and now we're working to put in place the necessary investments around processes, systems and governance to be able to scale these pilots across all the regions. Similarly, on the pricing front, we've identified a bunch of levers that allows us to capture a fairer share of the value that we create through our offerings. So price them right. And again, many of these have been piloted over the course of the last quarter and are closed some excellent results, and we are putting in place the necessary infrastructure to scale them. Finally, let's look at one other example initiative that relates to growing our market share through the focus that we have on multi-cloud and the multi-vendor ISV. Now let's take a step back here to understand why we are doing this? Why are we so insanely focused on multi-vendor? And why do we believe you have this right to win? So when we speak to customers, what is clear is the shift that's happening in their IT landscape where they move from an integrated suite-based approach to a best-of-breed approach. Now when they do that, SoftwareOne is perfectly placed to help them as they move to this modularized IT enterprise architecture. Why? Because we can bring to bear our deepened relationships across Microsoft, Google and AWS and our breadth of ISV offerings to advise them exactly on what capabilities are most relevant for them and suited to a specific customer. At the same time, our go-to-market transformation that we're driving that I've spoken about, around our coverage model shifts, will enable a more structured and a more programmatic way of driving this across this entire cross-sell motion across our installed base, leveraging the customer insight that you heard about over this afternoon. So clearly, our strategy and transformation is brought by the outcomes that we deliver for our customers. And there's no better way for us to articulate this than to hear from them. So let's roll the video, please. [Presentation]

So I'll close with what I started, which is I'm incredibly excited by the wealth of opportunity that we have as a company and what lies ahead of us. And I always believe that we fly best when we fly in formation. And the go-to-market transformation that we've rolled out will have us flying in formation to drive our next wave of profitable growth. Thank you.

I think that brings me to actually the next section, which is to, as you all know, that we have a 20-minute break before we come back and listen to Julia and Rodolfo for following that. So thank you, and I look forward to speaking to you after the break. [Break]

So welcome back. Thank you for being back on time, and obviously in full. And I'm very excited to welcome you to the second part of our Capital Market Day '24 for SoftwareOne. My name is Julia Braun. I'm the CHRO of SoftwareOne. I joined the company almost 1.5 years ago. So since Rohit joined recently, I can't say I'm the youngest, I'm [indiscernible] here, but still think I have a relatively fresh pair of eyes on the business and on P&C, people and culture, specifically. We have heard a lot about superpower at SoftwareOne. So -- and I'm very excited to talk about another superpower, at SoftwareOne, and the superpower is our people. So SoftwareOne is operating in the tech industry, but ultimately, we are a people company. And we all truly believe if we build the people, they will build the business. So we put a lot of focus and a lot of effort to our people. You've heard Brian talking about the new leadership team. I will give you a bit more of a broader overview on who we are in terms of our people, our so-called [indiscernible]. And let's look back a little bit. Even I'm here only for 15, 18 months. SoftwareOne went through some significant people changes over the last couple of years. Over the past years, we tripled our people base and we continue to grow. So we tripled the number of employees over 5 years. That significant. So the way we grow or we grew and still are growing is both organically, but also via acquisition. And today, during my presentation, you will see how the people and culture function is not only fully aligned with the Vision 2026, but also how we support and drive our key priorities to be successful over the next couple of years. So with this, first things first, who we are? This should resonate to what Brian said before. We are a global company with over 9,300 employees, across 4 regions. From a geographic point of view, the largest population sits in EMEA that also correspondent -- is corresponding to where the biggest business sits today. If you look into the functions, you find 65% of our people in product and delivery so basically in Bernd's teams and 17% in sales. But you can also look at our people from a diversity point of view. So, we -- I -- we all together, we are very conscious about gender balance. And I truly believe that diverse teams are delivering better results. This is scientifically proven over and over again. So I think it's fair to say that we are slightly ahead of the curve to our peers. One of the reason is our SoftwareOne Academy program that I will touch upon a little bit later today. But 33% to 66%. So 33% female representation is simply not good enough. So our ambition is to increase female representation, female leadership year-over-year, or I should better say, months over months, best daily. And to get there, we have launched a couple of initiatives to improve gender balance. One is gender-neutral hiring activities and top advertisement. We have launched female interview panels. We have also a subset of our academy that is fairly focused on young female tech talents. Again, we are super active here and are driving the agenda. We said before our superpower is our people, but let me be a little bit more specific here. Our superpower is our highly qualified expert base. So on the screen above me, you find some very impressive numbers. And SoftwareOne is committed to continue to invest in the development of our people, this is and still will be in future a priority for us. Over 5,000 certifications across Microsoft, AWS, Google. We have more than 1,300 architects, developers and designers and 250-plus data and artificial intelligence experts. So referencing back to what Bernd and Rohit said before, we are very well set to serve our clients with our experts. And in the year 2023, we invested a total of 34,000 hours in up and reskilling of our experts. We don't talk about leadership development programs. We talk about any other training or developmental activities. It's simply up and reskilling of technical skills. So I think that's a proven point that we are willing to invest in our people. So how can people and culture help to deliver the Vision 2026? Last year, it was a year of transformation for us in P&C. We followed the new business model. We changed our own organization to fit, and we based our P&C activities and our P&C team on 3 key pillars. First pillar, business partnering. It's all about local HR support in the country, in the region, in the federation to make sure that we adapt and execute all of our HR initiatives flawless and as well giving guidance to the local management team about people questions and organizational development. In parallel, we established a so-called Center of Excellence team. Center of Excellence was mainly created to ensure global consistency for our global P&C activities. To give you an example, today, we run talent acquisition through a global talent team. We ensure that the application or the applicant experience is standardized across the globe. We ensure that onboarding programs around consistency -- consistent around the globe. Training and development is put under the center of excellence as well as succession planning, performance management and project management. So these center of excellence are distributed in different countries, but serving all our regions and all our P&C business partners in the countries. And last but not least, one of the most obvious outcomes of our operational excellence was that we have huge potential to increase effectiveness and efficiency in our P&C teams. So we created a shared service center approach that was done together with finance, the finance department agreed as well for shared service centers. And we moved all our repetitive activities or transactional activities into shared services. We follow the -- we follow the SAM approach. We have 1 shared service center in Asia Pacific, mainly in India. We have 1 in Europe in Leipzig today. And then we are currently building the Americas in our Mexican hub. So with this activity, we -- with these activities, we can really increase -- we saw already results and we continue to increase the efficiency in P&C. With this, I would like to come to what are the high priority initiatives that we run in order to support the business. To set up a new organizational structure for P&C is great, but it's very internally focused. But our job is to support the business. So first and foremost, it's about talent attraction. We all know this slogan. It's a talent war today. It's very difficult to find right talent for any type of organization. So I don't think that SoftwareOne is an exception here. What we do constantly is we are mapping our organization to see where do our skills, competencies, but also capabilities sit today. And then look on ways on how to better leverage our knowledge space globally. If we have talent sitting in Leipzig, but if we lack talent in Latin Americas, how we can make sure that we bring the right teams together that we leverage on the fact that we are a global organization. And we also constantly review what new skill sets and competencies do we need in order to stay competitive. The whole world of artificial intelligence. It's new for us. We don't know yet where we land in 1 or 2 years. But we are in constant contact with our business partners, with our clients to learn and understand what are the skills that we need to either develop internally with re and upskilling or if we don't have it, to source externally. So this is a constant review together with the business together with our business partners also internally. And additionally, there's also a certain important initiative, how to fuel the talent pipeline internally. That's our SoftwareOne Academy. The SoftwareOne Academy is a program for young talents. And I will talk a little bit later about the Academy program in more depth. Well, secondly, once we have the talent, once we know where they sit, we have them here with us, what are we going to do with the talent. The second pillar or the second initiative is talent management and people development. Last year, we prioritized on a structured succession planning process. We first focused on the leadership team in 2023 with the structured process, and the ambition for 2024 and '25 is to expand the succession programs and add another 100 potential successors to ensure that we have business continuity for key positions in a growing organization. And in parallel, of course, once we have more potential successors, we also increased the number of leadership programs. We go through more structured assessments, and really need to see how we can place people in future. What we're going to do is to have more elaborated career passing for our people on different levels. And the third key initiative is based around compensation and rewards. I mentioned before that the entire P&C structure followed -- it was following now the new business model. But with a new business model, we also had to review compensation systems for all level of the organization. And what we did is we tied the compensation model to the new business model and split it into sales base or sales programs, and then we have non-sales or leadership programs. So this was remodeled last year. We are now in year 2. We are still learning. We are still tweaking a little bit. We see how we can best follow and how we can best support the business to make the programs attractive that people want to go the extra mile to deliver on our budget, ultimately on our strategy and then Vision 2026. We are also launching this year the first SoftwareOne global compensation philosophy, including -- or not including, but also supported by a new end-to-end HRIS. So we move away from organically grown HR system, where we have different countries with great local handmade systems to move it into one global tooling landscape for HR. And that will finally, better support hiring decisions. We want to transparently manage internal promotions. It should also -- or it will also give us a better follow-up on pay equality and any other data and analytics. And last but not least, we are also reviewing and engaging in a couple of more flexible benefit models to meet expectations of a very diverse workforce in different geographies. So we started with some pilots on flexible benefits, credits in Latin America, that sometimes you need to follow local legislation, but this specifically in Colombia gives us a bit room for testing alternative solutions. We are testing a more flexible holiday system in North America and in Netherlands. So we really need to see how we can flex our benefit model in order to be an attractive employer and attract talents. As I said before, we have an initiative called SoftwareOne Academy. The SoftwareOne Academy is a program that fundamentally changed the way we are looking at hiring and developing young talents today. The Academy combines talent attraction, skills and competency development at a very early stage, together with strong social purpose. So in a nutshell, the Academy program is hiring graduates directly from school or university and give them an opportunity to start a professional career in the software industry. And the beauty here is this initiative gives also people from all walks of life an entry point into a career in technology. We started in 2021 with the Academy. We facilitated many cohorts since that. In different regions, today, we have more than 450 learners or today, most of them are graduates already. And we are also very closely aligned with our partners. So we have the proof that our partners appreciate a lot what we do through the academy. We get co-funding from Microsoft and AWS. We get support in co-facilitation of new programs, and they are also very willing to use our Academy program to test the new technologies, to test some new ways on how young programmer, for example, can improve their skills. The 2024 ambition is to recruit 20% of net new hire through the Academy program. And it's not only the beauty that you fuel the pipeline very early with young talents, we have also seen a fantastic transitional rate from the Academy into the business. So it's over 85% of all graduates really move directly into a revenue-generating positions at SoftwareOne. And the other great side effect is the loyalty of our graduates. We see a retention rate of over 90% with our learners from Academy. Last year -- well, the Academy is not a static program, so we constantly review the different learning paths. We constantly review content, and the end of last year, we reviewed some of the programs and said, content-wise, great. We are super happy with what we achieved so far. But what we have not yet managed was how to find new circles of talent? How to find new potential future SoftwareOne employees? So we went very traditionally to schools and university. So what we the launch of -- so what we did is we launched a subset called SOAR program, SoftwareOne Academy Returnship program, and end of last year, we had our first young mother return to business program. We did run it very successfully. And we really opened a completely new world of candidates for SoftwareOnes. So we will continue to run a young mother but we will also focus on other target groups. There is another program for young talents. It's not directly linked to our Academy program. But for the sake of completeness, I would also like to mention that we -- for many, many years now, we run apprenticeship programs in different countries. Actually, we have 115 learners in 5 countries, and we will continue with this program as well. The transition rate is almost as high as through the Academy, but the apprentice learners are a bit younger than our Academy learners. So I spoke a lot about the Academy. We are really proud of this program, and it's proven to be super successful. And I would like to give you a bit more flavor on this program by sharing a video that was produced recently to attract the next or to attract the next generation of talents to join SoftwareOne. [Presentation]

So I hope you can feel how patient we all are about our SoftwareOne Academy. We will continue to work with the Academy format. We will continue to develop the format further. And -- with this, I would like to just repeat a few of the -- or give you a few key takeaways from my speech, the few things that I would like you to remember after I go from stage. We are super proud and we feel that to be a global and a very diverse talent base is really a big advantage in the markets, in the talent war market. Our people and culture strategy is really well embedded and aligned with our business. We are committed to invest in the future of our talent. It's about technically up and reskilling, but also the personal development of our people. And again, SoftwareOne Academy is and will continue to be the heart of the young talent development strategy. Thank you very much. And with this, I welcome Rodolfo, our Chief Financial Officer on stage.

Thank you, Julia. A warm welcome from my side. We come to the last section of the Capital Market Day, and I will translate the vision and strategy that Brian outlined and the strategy and plans from my colleagues, Rohit, Bernd, Julia, how all that is reflected in our financial numbers? Our goals and the building blocks to get to the goals. So I'll cover 2026. I'll cover 2024. That's a transition year for us. And then, of course, I'll say a few words about 2023 numbers, quarter 4 and the full year. Let me start with the '23 results. So Brian already mentioned, we were in line with our revised revenue guidance. We revised it with Q3 numbers, 8% growth. We achieved an EBITDA margin of 24.3%, in line with the original guidance that we set at the beginning of the year. Then, when we look at the quarter, growth of 6.6%, we had mixed performance, particularly soft in North America, Brian already referenced that. We anticipated a relatively muted budget flush in December, and that is reflected in the numbers. However, if you look at the quarter 4 numbers, here is what we see, and I'll talk a little bit later about that, the full impact of our operational excellence program. EBITDA margin grew by over -- EBITDA grew by over 14% in the period, and this reflects the significant impact of the program. Now looking at the results by business line, Bernd covered some of that. When we look at services, revenue grew by 11%, excluding legacy, and we have been mentioning that throughout the year, services grew 15%. Another big milestone already mentioned by Bernd, thanks to the efforts he has driven in terms of delivery excellence, the contribution margin is about 40%, 2.5 percentage points higher than prior year, and that places us at the top quartile of peers. And then when we look at the bottom line with an EBITA margin of 6%, almost double prior year or doubled prior year. Again, it's a very strong performance, and it shows the impact of operating leverage in that business. Now what you don't see in the slide, in quarter 4, the EBITDA margin was close to 17%. And while that number, of course, is not sustainable on an annual basis, it gives us confidence in reaching double-digit EBITDA margin this year and we're on track to the 15% EBITDA margin that we have described as a, call it, midterm ambition. As we look at Marketplace, growth of 5.6%, was very similar between Microsoft and what we call multi-vendor and EBITDA margin continues to be above 50%, which is best-in-class margin for that business. Operational excellence. You will remember this is a program we established already back in '22. We rolled it out in '23 to drive efficiency and effectiveness across commercial, delivery and support functions. When you look at the triangles on the left-hand side of the slide, we were fully in line with expectations and plan in delivery, in our different support functions. We're a bit short on sales, and this is what Rohit comes in with his transformation, go-to-market transformation to drive it in 2024. That's why you see the bar is a little bit wider for the commercial effectiveness. And what was a great achievement by the whole team is that we delivered 47 million savings against a target of 15 million savings for the year. When you look at the restructuring, provision, of course, it was higher as we accelerated some of the savings programs in quarter 4. Initially, we had guided for 25 million. We ended up with 39 million. And now we increased the cumulative target for '24 before it was a run rate of 50 million, we increased to 70 million, reflecting the overachievement this year. Now the program, as you can see, doesn't stop, of course, continues in '24 and beyond. I'll cover that in a moment. When it comes to cash, a very important topic. Very strong cash conversion. You see there, 73%. Actually, net working capital contributed to cash. It has been very tightly managed. We had slightly lower DSOs. We maintain DPOs constant, and CapEx reflects the investments behind [indiscernible], which is our marketplace platform. When we look at the full waterfall of cash, of course, there's dividend, there's a share buyback, there's taxes, there's restructuring costs, of course, which is -- which are impacting taxes. There were -- given the different -- very sharp movements of currencies, ForEx had also had significant impact and we end with still with a cash position or net debt position positive of over 180 million. So now we shift gears, and we're going to the next chapter of value creation. How do we translate Vision 20266 in the financial numbers? And I think the company is very well positioned to drive profitable growth and value creation, this is based on 3 pillars. Higher growth, and this is underpinned by the attractive addressable market growth of around 17%. The transformation in the go-to-market in the different growth priorities that have been presented by the team. When it comes to margin expansion, we have 3 very powerful levers. One is operating leverage. And operating leverage works very effectively when you're growing at the rates that SoftwareOne can grow. Then you have the continuation of the operational excellence program. And last but not least, pricing, which affects growth and margin. Last, but not least, maximizing value. Our priority is to invest behind growth organically and inorganically. But of course, we continue with our progressive dividend policy. You have seen we will recommend to the general assembly a dividend of CHF 0.36 for 2023, and we will complete our share buyback program that we have announced. Now before I go into the future, it is worthwhile just taking a brief moment to step back and talk about our baseline. Where do we come from? So over the last couple of years, we have grown double digit. This has been a combination of scaling up in services and bolt-ons, particularly in 2021 and '22. We have maintained the margin stable around 24%. This has been driven by significant savings in G&A and selling -- sorry, in delivery and G&A. And when it comes to selling, this is an area where we need to see a bit more productivity because also when we reflect on the growth, we realized when we look at the SAM and the potential of the market, we have been a touch below what we could achieve, right? So the key topics are we need to accelerate the growth. We need to improve the selling productivity. And then when it comes to the capital allocation we have had, as I mentioned before, a progressive dividend with a payout on the higher end of our guidance, which is between 30% and 50%. Now how do we get to the Vision 2026? How do we get from 8% revenue growth to the mid-teens? And then I will also make a reference we have been talking about the new portfolio segmentation in terms of customer outcomes and the graph depicts a bit the mix, and then on the right, you see the expected growth is not that different from the two, let's say, parts of the portfolio, Lead and Expand. So the biggest -- again, for me, it's critical, the underlying market is growing 17%. So the key driver of growth relates to sharpened execution. Within sharpened execution is go-to-market transformation. Of course, portfolio innovation and delivery from Bernd, talent from Julia are important, but it's the go-to-market transformation described by Rohit that will drive a significant part of the growth. Now the initiatives that we have outlined, that helps us even accelerate the growth further. We're talking here a couple of percentage points, 2 to 3. And last but not least, we, of course, have bolt-on M&A to build capabilities, and where needed, geographic presence. I mentioned, we continue with the operational excellence program in '24. In terms of sales, we have the transformation. But the other thing is to make sure we have the right commercial model as it relates to the team to match the new segmentation and the go-to-market approach. So we need to make sure we have the right resources, focus on the right customer segments in the right commercial model. As it relates to the delivery side, Bernd mentioned it, the one I would pick up is modularization of services. The way I describe it in a simple way is configuring services wherever possible, not customizing the services. And then as it relates to marketplace, this is supply chain. And so with supply chains is about standardization and automation. Rightsize support functions. Just to give you a flavor, we have moved 30 country operations into shared services in finance, 9 are ongoing and 17 will happen in 2024. Julia mentioned briefly, leveraging Workday, leveraging short service centers. In Nazir, he joined as our CIO. You've seen that in the beginning of the presentation, and IT didn't go through operational excellence last year, and now Nasier will help us drive operational excellence for his team. We don't stop here. This is an ongoing program. And so what happens beyond 2024 is leveraging data and AI everywhere, commercial, in delivery, support functions. Now of course, we are not waiting until we're in '25 to start leveraging that. We have pilots and we have described this in many of our meetings. For example, in terms of analytics, how do we make sure we target the right customers. So we have pilots going with tools like next best action, which points salespeople to the next best sales opportunity. Propensity consumption models, we're also running. And then as it relates to finance, you can imagine there's a lot of potential in terms of process automation using bots in our shared services. And we're piloting many of these initiatives, and we will roll out during '24 and further on in '25. Margin, I talked about the key building blocks. Operating leverage is the one of the big ones. And intrinsically, as part of the model, we have a certain negative mix effect, right? As we shift more of the portfolio into services. But as you see, the effect is relatively small as we continue to drive significant productivity in delivery. And when it comes to operating leverage, I give you an impression, when we talk about our selling costs, we believe we can increase at 2/3 the rate of sales. When it comes to G&A, we can increase at half the rate of sales. And we can get to levels of 21% of sales for selling costs, 17% of sales for G&A as we get into 2026. So a big opportunity of operating leverage, more than offsetting business mix and then comes, of course, operational excellence, as I mentioned, we will go for a cumulative target of CHF 70 million. And the journey doesn't finish in 2024. The program, of course, continues '25, '26 and beyond. So this gets us to the margin that Brian already mentioned, approaching 28% by 2026. Cash generation, we foresee to remain at a cash conversion rate of around 70%. This is predicated on maintaining, improving -- gradually improving net working capital with a lot of the operational excellence initiatives that I mentioned before, we can reduce the day sales, we can control better our DPOs. And as you have seen, we have already managed in the last couple of years to maintain a stable net working capital that, by the way, is negative, right, as you see it in the slide. So it's actually funding our balance sheet. In CapEx, when you go through the components, we have disclosed for this year, operating leases of around 17 million, then the rest is 10 million would be the normal operating CapEx that you would have for physical assets, and the rest, which is probably around in the neighborhood of 40 million, 50 million, you would say 60% of that we're investing in innovation, and that is the marketplace platform. The slide you have seen before, it's about our capital allocation, #1 priority, reinvesting behind growth, organic growth, one of the investments is clearly the Marketplace platform. Complementing the organic growth with bolt-on M&A. And here, we're very stringent in terms of our financial criteria, the level of rate of return, the level of margin accretion as we think of year 2 and 3. And very importantly, that it has to fit strategic in terms of what are the core capabilities we want to build, what is the geographic presence where we want to expand. And on the other hand, as I mentioned before, progressive dividend complete the share buyback as we promised. That brings me to the guidance. So Vision '26, Brian already shared the guidance. How can we drive profitable growth and maximize value, revenue growth mid-teens, margin approaching 28%? Now, as a team together -- put together strategy and the translation of the strategy, in addition, the team also felt that '24 is a transition year because change doesn't happen immediately. And as you have seen, there's a lot of good activities. There's a lot of good plans going on, but they cannot happen simply overnight. So '24 transition to higher growth. And here, we are guiding for growth between 8% and 10%. So progression on margin, 24.5% to 25.5%. And when you look at the return in terms of dividend, we maintain the guidance that we had before. So let me close here with just the key takeaways like in all the other presentations, very well positioned to drive profitable growth. This is on the back of a very fast-growing addressable market, go-to-market transformation and our growth initiatives. In terms of margin uplift, it's about operating leverage, operational excellence. We have very strong cash flow generation as a business, 70% cash conversion compared to adjusted EBITDA. And then when it comes to the capital allocation, #1 priority is to continue to invest behind growth. And with that, I will pass it over to Brian for the closing remarks, and thank you very much from my side.

All right. Well, thank you, Rodolfo, and thank you to all of my colleagues for joining me on stage. And I want to leave you with where I started, which is the key takeaways that I said we would touch on today. And I think you would agree that we have addressed all of those points. And as you can see, we have one, a clear vision for where we want to go to as an organization. Secondly, we clearly have the leadership team that will execute against this. And I will say as well that we have a massive opportunity ahead of us. So with that, I'm going to welcome Kiera and my colleagues back on stage and then we're going to open it up for Q&A.

All right. Thank you very much. We are now at the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] So is there any question here in the room?

Thank you for the presentation, very interesting. I think this question is for Brian, if I'm not mistaken. I think you mentioned at the beginning that you are repositioning your go-to market, if I understood correctly, joining the services with the marketplace so that you have solutions-oriented proposition. Can you please elaborate more exactly what that means in practice?

Sure. Happy to. So firstly, I would say that customers today, they no longer buy solutions, instead they're buying outcomes. So with a customer of ours, if they're going to buy a Microsoft products, it's not to do A, B, C, it's for the outcome that, that solution is going to be driving. And in order to receive that outcome, what's critical for the customer is going to be the services, the managed services that they're going to receive on an ongoing basis. Previously, our organization was set up where we had Marketplace as in the resell piece on one side, and we get the Services on the other side. So I firmly believe that if we want to deliver for our customers, we need to be structured internally the correct way and any organizational adjustments should be made in the best interest of our customer. So as we bring both marketplace and services together under Bernd's leadership, we now have the opportunity to not look at a resell piece and the services, but instead look through the lens that the customer does which is the outcome that they're going to be receiving as well. And I'm not sure, Bernd, do you like to add anything?

Yes, maybe a practical example, right? Many customers now transition to focusing on cloud cost because costs have ballooned. And so for us, we're in a position, if you want to buy the right to consume, make a commitment to a hyperscaler, we bundle FinOps with it to enable you to make -- to govern how you spend the cloud consumption internally. And we can also do cloud cost optimization for you. So we bundle a value proposition together that makes a commodity product, the right to consume on a hyperscale into something value-added that includes FinOps internally and also cloud cost optimization externally.

Good. Is there any other question in the room? If not, I suggest we move to the line. Operator, can you please read the first question.

Question comes from Martin Jungfleisch of BNP Pariba.

I have two questions, please. The first one is on the growth to the 8% to 10% this year. Would you say this is a bit more conservative given that there's still a bit of some underlying market weakness? And then how would you expect the trajectory to the mid-teens growth in 2026 evolve or be more gradual acceleration to mid-teens [indiscernible] towards 2026. And how dependent is really the growth target and the success of the Copilot? That's the first question.

Thanks, Martin. I'll take that first. So firstly, in terms of the guidance for this year, 8% to 10%, as we've said, this year is a transitionary year for us. As you saw, we have rolled out our new vision and obviously behind that vision is various changes that we're going to be driving internally as an organization. We firmly believe in the guidance through to 2026, given the underlying growth that's happening within the market as well. Specifically on your question, is it conservative? I would say that we firmly believe in the 2026 guidance. We as a team are here to win. We want to get to our 2026 guidance, as we said, in terms of mid-teens, and we're committed to doing that. As we move through the year in terms of reporting on our progress around our high-growth markets, we're going to continue to do that for all of you. And a lot of this is obviously dependent upon the execution that Rohit and the team will be driving. Specifically in terms of Copilot, as we have said before and then reiterated today, we do see a massive opportunity for us in the market, given the demand across all segments of the pyramid that you saw on the screen because our customers are crying out for data and AI solutions specifically, as we said, we're Copilot, we do see a CHF 100 million opportunity for ourselves. We have had a lot of success in Q4. And what I would point out is that in Q4, we actually didn't have Copilot to sell to SME and corporate space. Instead, we were selling services engagements, and that was highlighted in the video from AAMI in terms of the workshop that we did with them. Now moving forward, Copilot is available. Microsoft launched it available to the entire market on January 15, and we expect to see continued progress with our sales of Copilot to our customers. And I'm not sure maybe Rohit, do you want to add anything from a go-to-market perspective?

I think you covered it well. I mean, we're confident in the 8% to 10% growth in the current year because of the fundamentals of the business, which are strong and the massive installed base that we keep speaking about and the share of wallet that we are driving with a multi-vendor strategy. And as regards the specific initiatives, be that around Copilot or any of the others across the wheel, the front-end sales engine is lining up behind those -- that portfolio as well. This isn't about portfolio development in isolation from the execution on the field. So the sales engine is ramping up not just around those segments but also around the portfolio like we showed a few times to be able to take that to market in an accelerated fashion which is why we also feel confident about the growth, the trajectory to the mid-teens that was asked about.

Good. Can we take the second question? next

Sorry about that. I thought I had 2 questions. Just on the automation, right? I think you mentioned this automated platform in the online marketplace. Would you say this is a key differentiator compared to peers? And based on your knowledge, do your peers already have this sort of online marketplace, where you would be able to quote faster, make faster deals and limit churn and things like that?

Sure. So I will take that first, and then I'll pass it to Bernd. Firstly, we are on a mission, whereby we want to make it as smooth as possible for our customers to buy at their fingertips, whereby they can log in, as you saw from the demo with Max and they can execute on that purchase. The differentiator that we have against all of our peers is that we operate in more countries than any of them. When somebody who's sitting in Indonesia, when they're sitting in Ecuador, when they're sitting in Colombia or wherever they are in the world, and they want to be able to purchase a license, I can tell you in our space, they want that license right now. And what marketplace offers to our customers is the ability to transact and to do that by themselves and to do it quickly. In addition, Bernd mentioned the fact that we've made this available to our internal sellers as well as a test to see how do they adopt it. And there's nothing better than giving a solution to sellers to see will they use it. The great news is that we have seen them adopt it at a rapid pace, which is again confirming the ease of the solution to use. And as Bernd shared we are seeing a trajectory in terms of the volumes that are going through at the market price, which we will continue to move -- we'll continue to share moving forward. And in addition, I would say, yes, this absolutely is a differentiator compared to our peers. Bernd?

Yes. Yes, it is a good differentiator. The best way I can explain it is reselling sounds simple, but it's very complicated if you think about availability, about tax rates, about where you build for what, when? Is there a master contract on some global level? Are you buying decentrally? And so there's a lot of tribal knowledge within our company and codifying that tribal knowledge and putting it in a platform so that you can automate and have both the vendor side and the client side self-serve is a very hard problem. And we're pretty far along with that. And to our knowledge, others have not tackled this in the same way. And so I see this as a key differentiator because the quality and the response rate for quotes or for the request to buy will be better. And then adding our reach in a number of countries, as Brian said, and also the 7,500-plus publishers we're working with, this becomes a competitive weapon.

Can we move to the next question.

Our next question comes from Joe George of JPMorgan.

I've got three questions. Two probably for Brian and then one maybe for Rodolfo. So maybe 2 for Brian first. Just within the 8% to 10% growth guidance through 2024, could you just help us in terms of how we should think about the split of growth between marketplace and services? And then secondly, just on Copilot and the $100 million revenue opportunity there, how much of that is baked into both the '24 and midterm guidance, if any?

Sure. So firstly, in terms of the split between market price and services, we continue to expect that services will be growing in the double digits. As you saw from Rodolfo, 15% in 2023. We do have a drag, which naturally is our legacy services. However, now Joe, as we move into 2024 with the clear articulation of our focus in the higher growth markets where we have the opportunity to have modularized offerings from a services perspective, which will not be these custom builds, but will be, in many instances, services, which will be more standard and a rinse and repeat model, we have an opportunity to look at accelerating our growth on the services perspective. What is critical to the acceleration of everything that Bernd will be delivering is the partnership that Bernd and Rohit together, and I'm very confident in our ability to execute on the go-to-market jointly. And then in terms of Copilot, right now, we are not disclosing how much we have built into a Copilot for 2024. The reason for that is, obviously, it has only been launched on January 15. And as we continue to make progress with our customers, we certainly will be disclosing the progress around Copilot moving forward. But what I would reiterate is the massive opportunity we have and the pent-up demand that is within our customer base, and quite frankly, within SME and corporate. A lot of this has been fueled based on the expectations that employees of these organizations have when they come, quite frankly, to the enterprise every day. Rodolfo?

So maybe on the third question, could you repeat or mention, Joe, the third question.

Yes. Yes, of course. I think third question would just be on the linearity of the margin trajectory from here. I guess, the sort of 300 to 400 basis points of margin expansion from '23 out to 2026, to get to the new midterm guidance. How should we think about the linearity of this? Is it more or less a straight line? Or is it can be back-half loaded? Just any color there would be great.

Yes. Look, this is a little bit following the prior question on the -- how does the growth evolution go from the 8% to 10% to the the mid-teens. First, we are convinced on the guidance for 2026. This is definitely a number in terms of growth and margin that is completely achievable. And then as you think about the progression, it is linear, right? It's not a hockey stick, and it's true both for the revenue growth and for the margin. And it has to do more with the pace of implementation of the different programs you heard today that, of course, they don't happen overnight. And as they start getting traction, you will see them reflected both in margin and in the revenue growth.

Good. Shall we move to the next question?

Our next question comes from Balajee Tirupati from Citi Group.

Two questions from my side. Firstly, on margins, your target of reaching 28% by 2026, would it be possible to break your target between services and marketplace? The target of reaching mid-teens or services probably would imply closer to 5 percentage point improve in margin in Marketplace. You already have a very strong margin profile. So could you share some color on what you think will be driving that? And the second question is on cash conversion. Based on the free cash flow definition that SoftwareOne has, the free cash flow number in the last 2 years has been on the weaker side. So should we expect that to improve from here? And what are going to be drivers for that?

So maybe I'll take one part of the first question, and then I'll turn it over to Rodolfo and Bernd to weigh in as well. So specifically in terms of the margin, from a marketplace perspective, obviously, we have a very healthy business and we are best-in-class in terms of margin within marketplace. We currently do have an initiative underway to assess how we could be more efficient within that space as well. Like I've said before, evolution is certainly within the DNA of SoftwareOne, and we are currently assessing where there is an opportunity to fine-tune from a marketplace perspective our margin. And similarly, as it relates to services, repeating myself a little bit here, but obviously, the modularized services that we're going to be offering have the opportunity for us based on the partnership with Rohit to look at how we can have some margin expansion there as well. Bernd?

Yes. So I would look at the business in 2026 in 3 pieces. There's the business that clearly will be marketplace. There's a business that clearly will be services and then a large and growing piece in the middle that is both, and you can have endless debates from the left pocket to the right pocket, it is now marketplace or is it services. Microsoft CSP business is a good example. There are more and more examples where we bundle. They like the right to use a license with value-added services. And then it's a bit academic to attribute discrete values to one or the other. So internally, we do the best for the customer and the best for SoftwareOne. And we don't worry too much drawing a distinct line between the two. So it's going to be a bit fluid, where to attribute some of those gains. But -- make no mistake, the delivery model on both sides has to be becoming more efficient. We need to make more gains in services. We need to defend in marketplace and then together with Rohit, right, we need to make go-to-market more efficient. We have to replace human presales with configurator with a rule set that allows the seller to configurate instead -- to configure instead of using a services presales person to architect a solution. That will be possible in the SME business, maybe a little bit in corporate for some services, and that will provide us some leverage and then add productivity on the sales force to this, and then you can see your path to increasing from 25% to 28% our margin.

Then on the cash conversion, it's absolutely a fair statement. I think when you look at the, what I call the operating cash and the level of cash conversion is very healthy. Of course, when you go and -- we saw it in the waterfall, we have a relatively high dividend, tax, et cetera, that will continue. I think what has hurt a bit is the free cash flow in the last couple of years, of course, as we are going through this transformational program, there's been a lot of expenses that have been below the line, right? These are the adjustments from EBITDA to core EBITDA in many of those to have a cash component. The question is how do we see it going forward? We see it improving significantly, and this will be driven by two things. One is as we expand the revenue and you expand the margin, of course, the EBITDA base will be much higher. And then as the company continues to move into what I would call a more smooth operating model, then, of course, you will not see any of these restructuring costs that have impacted the last couple of years. So we have a clear path to improving the overall free cash flow going forward.

Very clear. Lastly, if I may add one more question here. In terms of business plan to sharpen portfolio focus, should we expect more charges going forward on account of discontinuation of certain parts of portfolio?

Yes, Balaji, I will take that. And I will say that, firstly, when I joined SoftwareOne, I said I like things simple. So I would like to have our strategy fit on 1 slide, and I would like maximum 5 things. And lo and behold, we now have a strategy where we laid out in terms of Lead and Expand 1 slide, and it happens to be 5 things. The commitment that I'll give to you Balaji and to everybody moving forward is, we will continue to evolve our portfolio, and we do that to best serve our customers. As we're going to bring to market new offerings, which we think are relevant for our customers, we certainly will be sharing them with you. And it's critical that we continue to have this path of evolution if we want to continue to serve our customers better. And moving forward, on a quarterly basis, you should expect to see and hear more from us around the portfolio and the progress that we are making around it and obviously, also the execution of that in the field under Rohit and team.

With that, we have no further questions on the phone line. So I'll hand back to [indiscernible].

Good. So if there are no further questions, I would thank you all very much for being here. And for those that are in Zurich, we can move on to the last section of the event, which is the [indiscernible].

Okay. Thank you, everybody.

Thank you.