SoftwareOne Holding AG ($SWON)

So good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to SoftwareOne's 2026 Capital Market Day. My name is Kjell Arne Hansen. I'm the Head of Investor Relations for the company. I'm very happy to see so many of you joining us here in Zurich today, and also a warm welcome to everyone joining us online. The Capital Market Day we have today marks a milestone for us in our investor and analyst engagement, close to a year after the combination with Crayon. Today, we will give you the opportunity to learn more about our combined capabilities and the significant value creation opportunities that we have today in a market that is becoming increasingly more complex for our customers. You will hear this story directly from several of our members from the management team. You will also hear it from our customers. You will also hear it from our channel partners. And last but not least, you will hear about our strategic partnership with Microsoft and Nicole Dezen. Before we start, I would just like to draw your attention to the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements and non-IFRS measures. But we have a very exciting day ahead of us, so I suggest we just get started. And I would like to introduce our co-CEOs, Melissa Mulholland and Raphael Erb on stage.

Thank you. Welcome. It's truly a pleasure to be here with you today, seeing so many people that have been by our side as shareholders, analysts, employees, making this combination come true. We are so grateful for all of your support. And building on that, many of you kept asking us, when can you do a Capital Markets Day? And here we are. Our objective is to provide further clarity and confidence in how we are planning to evolve as a company and build lasting shareholder value. Our internal ethos that we always talk about is, walk the talk, and we are very committed to deliver on what we present today. At SoftwareOne, we have a long-standing tradition of starting each meeting with our core values, which spell out the word impact and focusing on one that best illustrates the purpose of the content. For today's event, it's all about momentum. We are on a true trajectory as a company, building on our strong Q4 and Q1 performance and most importantly, our long-standing business model of being a trusted adviser to our customers. 2025 was an intense year, but our focus remained committed to the business and success of the integration of Crayon. And we're so grateful to be here today to take you through that in further detail.

Thank you, Melissa. Good afternoon, everyone. A warm welcome also from my end. It's great to see so many investors, analysts, media in the room today. The room is packed. So we are very thankful to all of you for taking the time. Let me start by providing you an update on where we are with our most significant integration in the history of the company, bringing Crayon and SoftwareOne together as one. We are very pleased with the progress, which is already tracking clearly ahead of schedule. As of end of May, we have realized CHF 86 million of run rate cost synergies. This means we are already in the range of our CHF 80 million to CHF 100 million cost synergy commitment. Based on our forecast, we see a very good chance to already deliver the CHF 100 million in cost synergies by Q2 with our result announcement. And with that, close the chapter of integration. Our revenue synergy pipeline is strong and above our internal targets. Our results with the last two quarters delivering double-digit growth underline this. Execution is firmly on course. And while there is still work to do, we can clearly say that we operate as one organization. Importantly, the scale and reach of the combined business are strengthening our customers and our vendor relationships. With continued consolidation across the industry, this underscores the strategic logic of the combination. Crayon and SoftwareOne has created a business of unmatched scale, reach and expertise. 12,000 employees are operating in 70-plus countries worldwide. We are servicing 70,000-plus customers directly. And this is very important, another 200,000-plus customers indirectly through our 12,000 channel partners. In total, we, therefore, reached more than 270,000 customers directly or indirectly via our channel partner network. As of year-end 2025, our gross sales on a combined like-for-like basis reached CHF 18 billion. Cloud consumption has been growing ongoing over the years, reaching CHF 9 billion, means half of our total gross sales is cloud consumption-based contracts. Throughout the day, you will -- we will obviously elaborate more about the AI era and our role in that era. But you can imagine that with AI, we foresee cloud consumption to further massively increase over the next years. Furthermore, CHF 4 billion of our gross sales globally is digitally transacted, means automated run rate through our platforms. Looking at our vendor relationships, we are deeply embedded across 10,000-plus vendors with more than 12,000 certifications across the hyperscalers and other ISVs. Last but not least, Gartner and IDC recognize us as the global leader in software asset management services, which refers to our IT asset management, to our cost management portfolio, which is really the core of what we do. We help our customers optimize the software and cloud and AI spend. This is the platform we are building from. And today, we'll show you what we intend to do with it and why we are convinced that the AI era actually plays to our cards and creating a powerful tailwind for SoftwareOne. SoftwareOne is the leading global software and cloud solution provider that helps customers optimize modernize and operate their technology estate. First, we help customers optimize their software, cloud and AI costs through our IT cost management as well as software and cloud sourcing services. Second, through our cloud services and data and AI portfolio, we help customers modernize and innovate their environment. Finally, we help to operate and secure these environments through our managed services portfolio, creating ongoing customer engagement and generating new cross and upsell opportunities to optimize and to innovate again. This is the flywheel approach which we are having. This creates a recurring customer life cycle, optimize costs, reinvest savings into transformation and then operate the new environment efficiently. Our portfolio is built around that life cycle, combining advisory, implementation and managed services with deep relationships across the software and cloud ecosystem. As you can see on the right side of the slide, we are operating our business across three business lines: Software and Cloud Direct, Software and Cloud channel, Software and Cloud Services. Software & Cloud Direct and Channel represents our sourcing or in other words, our reselling business of our portfolio. Software & Cloud Services is across IT cost optimization, cloud services as well as data and AI solutions. Let's move now from what we do to who we serve. We bring our portfolio to market through three customer segments. In SME, we predominantly provide standardized and scalable solutions that allow customers to access enterprise-grade technology with simplicity and speed. In corporate and enterprise, we combine software, cloud and services to help these organizations accelerate transformation while controlling cost and complexity. In public sector, we serve government agencies, education institutions, and health care organizations. It's a distinct go-to-market motion for us because it has slightly unique and different buying behaviors, procurement processes, funding mechanisms and licensing models compared to commercial enterprises. It's a very important segment for us as we are seeing good growth momentum and sustainable strong growth in that segment in the future. Finally, our channel business significantly extends our reach by enabling partners to leverage SoftwareOne, the platform, services and expertise, creating additional scale and market access. SoftwareOne mainly acquired the channel business through Crayon, and this has been one of the key strategic rationale for the acquisition. Today, we operate our channel business in 25 countries, and we want to obviously further scaled it out across the globe, across our 70 markets we operate in. The channel business is very resilient with high partner retention rates, consistent recurring revenue streams, and it delivers our highest EBITDA margin across the three business lines. Furthermore, it's our fastest-growing business line. Overall, our combination of life cycle-driven portfolio and large diversified customer coverage together with our channel partners is very unique. One of our most important indicators of the strength of our business is the performance of customers that engage with both our transactional and services capabilities. Today, 20% of customers generate 66% of revenue with a retention rate of 91%. This demonstrates the power of our flywheel, optimize to innovate. When customers move beyond transactional relationship and engage SoftwareOne across the life cycle, they become larger, more strategic and more loyal customers. As a result, one of our biggest growth opportunity and key focus areas is not simply acquiring new customers. It is increasing wallet share through service attach or in other words, expanding transactional relationships into life cycle partnerships. Everything you just heard and how to screen recording will hear throughout the day around our strategy and the opportunity we see ahead of us comes obviously down to execution and accountability. To deliver on our ambitions, we have a leadership team that combines deep industry expertise, strong operational capabilities and a shared commitment to customer success and value creation. It was important for us to introduce you today not only the Executive Board, but really our extended leadership team. This is the team where ultimately all our employees report into. This is the team who has been leading over the last 12 months throughout a successful integration of Crayon plus SoftwareOne. We are obviously very proud and thankful to this team. Many of them are here with us, and they will contribute to the presentations. They will come up on stage, so you will get a flavor of the team and looking forward to the ongoing dialogue. With that, I hand over now back to you, Melissa.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Now that you've met our leaders, I would like to spend a few minutes discussing our approach to ESG. as we see this as an important competitive advantage for us in how we go to market and attract and retain talent, which is our most important asset in the business that we serve. ESG is embedded in our business, and we deliver it through our cost optimization service, which we often call Software Asset Management, or ITAM, but specifically in the ESG category, we call it GreenOps, a practice that helps customers reduce carbon emissions across cloud and AI environments. We see this as a driver of both growth and resilience. It helps our customers achieve their sustainability goals. And in fact, in most RFPs, customers expect this. It helps us be able to deliver higher-valued services and strengthens the business by reducing risk and improving future readiness. In 2026, we will continue to scale GreenOps, improve our climate disclosures, advance our DEIB initiatives and further enhance our information security and resilience capabilities. From an AI perspective, we have incorporated ethical AI into our framework to ensure we have the necessary guardrails in place with the solutions we build for our customers. Now speaking of AI, it's clear that the pace is accelerating. If you look at tech spend, by 2030, it's expected to reach $4.8 trillion. The opportunity is immense. Underlying the tech spend, the growth overall is 9% on a compound annual growth rate over the midterm, strongly driven by AI. Across our addressable market, we expect 6% growth in the transactional business and 9% in services. Both revenue pools are supported by AI-driven demand with services benefiting the most, driven by our core capabilities in ITAM and FinOps, as well as emerging areas such as AI spend management. The new word is tokenomics. And for us, this momentum is not new. We are used to change. In fact, we thrive in it. To illustrate this further, let me take you back in our history journey as a company. In the 2000 era, the focus in technology was all about software licensing. Customers wanted the benefits of software, but were confused by all of the complexities around licensing rules and product use rights. Vendors such as Microsoft, created their own software asset management teams that were known to raise questions about compliance, which often resulted in higher costs and triggered audits. I was one of those people. I worked at Microsoft, leading software asset management out of the U.S., and we always called our peers and colleagues the PhDs of licensing. We thrived on increasing costs. That's why companies like Crayon and SoftwareOne had to develop software asset management capability to advise those customers around audit, compliance, spend management. This is core to who we are as a company. It's what we do. But the complexity continued thereafter. It expanded into the areas of cloud. Everyone knows the cloud journey. But sometimes we forget the fear, the uncertainty that existed back then from data being stored in basements and data centers to being moved into the cloud and the fear of what does that mean? Will there be risk, security? How will all of this be managed? That still exists. That complexity, that fear exists in many parts of the world. Most companies still don't have everything fully migrated to the cloud. And then while vendors are pushing customers to go all in, customers are increasingly becoming more wary of what cloud partner they should actually put their data in? This is all very confusing. This raises more and more questions in a cloud-based era, but the journey is not over. Then came SaaS applications and subscription services. So moving from seats to cloud consumption, it was no longer about having a license to a particular use of software, but how do you manage consumption, adoption, again rising costs. Then there's GDPR, security, privacy, risk, how do we navigate all of this? The opportunities in the cloud were so diverse that every single customer -- almost every single customer I speak to, and you'll meet today, actually have their cloud environments across multiple cloud players. Now we are in the AI era, the industrial revolution of technology. Each phase of this technology journey creates complexity. And each phase we support our customers in today. So when you ask us, is AI a threat? We actually see it as an opportunity because each phase of this is required to be AI ready to be able to actually manage the tail spend, be able to manage all of these things is something that we know best. AI moves from experimentation to enterprise scale and adoption and the ability to outpace it and governance becomes increasingly complex. This leads to uncontrolled costs, greater vendor complexity, which model do I use, regulatory challenges, sovereign cloud, limited visibility on outcomes, how do I make return on investment? We all know that the opportunity is there, but how do we really turn that into tangible outcomes. This is precisely where SoftwareOne plays. We support customers in managing complexity and cost optimization to deliver optimal return on investment. The scale of the opportunity is clear. Gartner expects AI-driven demand to grow at 33% CAGR over the midterm with precisely AI data spend increasing sevenfold over the same period. Now why would customers choose us in this AI era? First and foremost, global reach. Raffi described this earlier, operating across 70 countries, but we have local expertise with strong capabilities across SMB, mid-market, backed by over 25 years of proprietary licensing intelligence across millions of transactions. We provide vendor-agnostic advice. We are independent, combining strong partnerships with Microsoft, AWS, Google and other hyperscalers, operating over 10,000 publishers. We are also globally recognized as leading in cost optimization with provide unparalleled visibility into IT spend, which is confirmed by $1 billion in cost reductions over the last two years that we've achieved with our customers. Vendor ecosystems are consolidating around partners that can deliver scale, reach and customer impact. We help those vendors grow their established portfolios while expanding into the next generation of technologies and AI. We are the only partner in the world connecting vendors to the full customer spectrum across enterprise, mid-market, SMB, across direct channel over 70 countries around the world. And critically, we are independent. We are truly that trusted adviser. We can benchmark all of these vendors, data, prices, which gives us a unique perspective that is unparalleled and most importantly, gives us trust with our customers. Now speaking of scale, -- we have a platform. In fact, we have two platforms: marketplace, servicing mid-market up to enterprise customers as well as Cloud IQ servicing our channel partners. The platform itself provides access to automated purchasing, renewals, billing with software licensing, which is vital to providing digital access to software and cloud services. In today's digital era, this is a must. AI is redefining how customers buy, raising the bar for self-service and vendor execution speed. And we will include AI into the platform that we serve so that we have better insights, capabilities to serve our customers and our partners. We are improving the platform, bringing this together with a unified capability connecting our customers, vendors, and partners across the full life cycle, enabling faster productivity, insight, management of their software spend to operate their business needs. This is an evolution of a proven platform, providing more reach and scale to our customers and our partners. Now AI is embedded in everything we do. For us to deliver this to customers, we also need to internalize AI. As I said at the beginning, our motto is walk the talk. That goes for you, that also goes for us and our customers. It's becoming integral in how we operate and deliver value. We approach it through a clear AI-first framework. First, we have AI as a solution. This brings our AI customers through our dedicated well-established offering. To give some context around that, we are not new to this. We've been doing it for 10 years. We were AI Partner of the Year in 2019 for Microsoft and are proud of that. It's opened up the doors for AWS and Google. We have deep expertise across the globe. But second, there is an integrated AI, which embeds AI across our customer-facing solutions to enhance productivity and outcomes. Think agents, how do we scale that available to our customers. And third, internal AI. We are embedding this across our internal operations. This is a key focus area for us as we continue to integrate AI into how we work to deliver and make decisions across the organization. Of course, this is about efficiency, but it's also about helping our sellers, and our people be able to actually get more customer insights so that we can service them even better. This is already driving higher productivity, greater consistency and faster execution, and supports our ability to scale and create efficiency over time. All of this is built on our strong foundation of expertise that we've learned through throughout the years. And you'll hear more about this later on in the presentation. We have five structural advantages that are hard to replicate as we deepen and scale. Our proprietary IP through our platform and solution capability is essential. Vendor breadth across 10,000 providers, giving us a rich data insight across global software and cloud services providers so that we could truly benchmark and categorize that whole pricing and cost capability and also insights to better support our customers. Lastly, leading services and of course, our domain expertise from our incredible talent pool across our employee organization. Millions of transactions give us pricing and licensing intelligence to create a higher barrier to entry, which no competitor can match. These are not just moats for today, each one compounds as AI makes data and proprietary IP increasingly valuable. Now let me transition and brief you into our midterm guidance with all of this said. Hanspeter will cover this in further detail. We are uniquely positioned to deliver sustainable, profitable growth. On revenue, we target high single-digit CAGR with clear momentum across all our business lines. On profitability, we expect consistent margin expansion throughout the midterm above 28% EBITDA margin by 2030. Cash. It is so important in terms of our balance sheet, our liquidity overall. Our cash flow, our ambition is greater than 60% cash conversion. Furthermore, we confirm our commitment to our dividend policy with a target payout of 30% to 50% of net profit. Now let me conclude. We are the global leader in structurally growing market. Complexity is our tailwind. We thrive in supporting our customers navigating this complex IT landscape. And AI and cloud accelerates that, yielding to a competitive advantage. The combined group is built for scale with an unmatched reach and platform to win with extremely high barriers to entry. And lastly, we have a visible path to our 2030 ambitions. Thank you. Now to go further into this detail, I'm going to invite Oliver Berchtold to the stage to take you through this.

Thank you, Melissa. Also a very warm welcome from my side. I'm Oliver Berchtold, and I am the Chief Operating Officer for SoftwareOne. So in the next 30 minutes, Alex Waldhaus, our VP for Data and AI, will walk you through our business model in greater detail. Let me start with this slide. You have already seen it, and it's a very important slide for our business model. Technology has never moved faster. This has a great opportunity for SoftwareOne. Why? Because for customers, the speed means complexity and complexity costs money, but it also makes money. Too much uncontrolled cost, too many vendors, too many regulations, too little on what actually the business results are. Our business model is to build to change exactly that, helping customers to take back control, make decisions based on insights and turning technology truly into business outcomes. You have heard it, we call it our flywheel, a cycle, a life cycle with the customer. So let me show you how we do that step by step. Our business model works in two ways. We have the external part where we are aligning the flywheel across the entire customer journey. Our portfolio is structured to meet the customer where they are today and expand with them throughout the entire life cycle they're going through. Internally, we have the exact same model, but we focus on our internal operations on scaling what works as well as organizing our capabilities and aligning the execution across the entire business of SoftwareOne. So this is not just a go-to-market motion. This is how we operate and how we manage the business on a daily basis. The commercial pressure is growing with all the cloud and AI investment that have to be monetized. This needs a connected end-to-end model, and that is exactly our flywheel, the life cycle from optimization to innovation. We start with the first phase with the IT Cost Management. This is where we bring control back to the customer, create visibility, governance as well as cost discipline. The second phase is the Software & Cloud Sourcing, buying to simplify how software and cloud decisions through our licensing expertise, our vendor insights and our support in the procurement process can be done. Next is the Cloud Services. Here is where we enable customers to migrate, to modernize, to secure and manage the hybrid and multi-cloud environment that they're running. And last but not least, our fourth phase of the flywheel is our Data & AI, where we truly turn data and AI ambitions into practical, scalable solutions that measure outcomes. Each step of that life cycle, our flywheel strengthens the next optimization funds innovation. Better sourcing reduces complexity, stronger infrastructure and platform enables better foundation for a more and bigger data AI outcome. To give you a little bit more tangible analogy from the airport and travel. Some of you have traveled here. We are the fly planner ensuring resources are efficiently used, whatever it's human capital or technology capital. We're a travel agency selecting the right route as well as the right partners for the customers. Then we also the ground crew because we keep operations stable and securely. And we are the air traffic controller, very important because we're bringing order into the entire complexity of the flywheel and the life cycle to guiding the customer safely to the destination where they want to get to. So this is how we provide value to the customer in one connected journey. If we now combine the flywheel with our portfolio, -- we see that the portfolio here is covered with a flywheel. And the areas that our strategic portfolio entails all four phases. We not only operate a global go-to-market that serves all the customers across all industry segmentations, but we also embed AI in everything we offer and deliver. Our less strategic portfolio that you can see on the right side, our offerings that are available based on local opportunities only, for example, our SAP business. This is built and has to support the core, which is part of the strategic portfolio. If something locally doesn't pay into the core, the strategic portfolio, it's not something that we want to do anymore, and we will be phasing it out. A strategic portfolio for us is very, very critical because it ensures we focus our investment where it matters the most for us, where it moves the needle instead of trying to be everything for everyone, which ultimately destroys not only focus but also margins. We clearly define and productize our offering, the strategic portfolio. We move from one-off very high effort-driven workload to scalable and repeatable solutions with AI injected. And that allows us to grow revenue faster than cost, which will improve the margins. The first phase of our life cycle is the IT Cost Management. Back to the storm of pressure that customers are facing today. It's hitting them from all different dimensions. First, you have the cloud and AI cost is becoming very unpredictable. Consumption is scaling fast. You have pricing usage-based and many simple don't have the visibility and actually worse, the control. Second, you have pricing models, which become more and more complex because of the combination of licensing constantly involving. -- contracts are harder to navigate and costs are less transparent. Remember, complexity makes money. Third, spend is fragmented. Different teams are buying from different vendors across multiple clouds, vendors and often without centralized view or governance. But each of these challenges is an opportunity for SoftwareOne to bring in clarity, structure, and confidence into managing everything that is software related. And this is truly how we optimize. We help customers to take back control around software, cloud and AI through our advisory services, ITSM management and FinOps. We bring that full transparency and visibility into the spend and the usage and make inefficiency clearly visible for them. We don't only stop there. With our experience for over 20 years in software management and optimization, we help the customer to execute our learned best practices across all these customers, and you have heard it 2,000 projects a year to truly free up money as well as resources. Again, human capital or technology resources. As the global #1 in Gartner's Software Asset Management Magic Quadrant, we implement this for customers so they can reduce up to 30% in their software and cloud spend, but also reduce the risk of service cost by 200%, as Gartner states. So let me show you what this means in a real customer example. Imagine you can invest $1 and you get $4 back. Wouldn't we all love this? And that's exactly what we have achieved for Vestas. They're managing 5,000 applications across 45,000 devices with limited visibility, no SAM governance and tooling underutilized. The result, they faced with overlicensing, cost leakage, and growing security risks because of all the applications. We stepped in. We defined software management strategy and governance model. And not only that, we created an end-to-end visibility into the licensing as well as the actual usage to give the customer for the first time, a fact-based view on where they spend the money and verse where they're wasting it. We reduced that waste, we streamlined the applications, we improved how they procured and did the vendor management. The result, a staggering CHF 3.4 million in total savings till year-to-date. We have driven this cost savings through IT and cloud work mainly, but the sourcing still has a lot of potential. As a result, we now have a seat at the table with the customer to talk about the next level of unlocking saving potential for Software & Cloud Sourcing. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the magic of our flywheel, one step to the next, which is in the second phase, our Software & Cloud Sourcing. Once the customer has this transparency and this control, the next challenge they always face is how do we make the right choices in an increasing complex licensing market. Customers are dealing with vendor lock-in with fragmented environments with different standards as well as high system integration costs into the different vendor ecosystems like ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce and other platforms. At the same time, buying itself has become very, very complex. You got different marketplaces, you have private offers, you have different rules, you have different incentive programs and operations. And you can also buy direct and indirect. So tell me what to do best. And even beyond that, the licensing rules are continuously increasing. You have now with AI, the tokens, consumption-based, frequent changes and also, this is the worst for customer, multiple license metrics, which creates unclear pricing, leading to constant surprises and who likes surprises, absolutely nobody. In short, too many options, too many providers, and too much complexity that you could actually plan your cost or predict what it will look like down the road. And our role is here to simplify exactly that. We provide access to software to cloud as well through the -- across the global multi-vendor ecosystem through our sourcing services, reselling capabilities and channel business, all with decades of experience on how to do it best for our customers. We help them find the right options. We secure the best commercial terms, and we make sure every decision fits the outcome they want to achieve today and tomorrow. And that's how we reduce complexity in Software & Cloud Sourcing as well as improving the cost control, as you saw in Phase 1, setting the foundation really for the customer what comes next, that it's a solid foundation. Let me introduce you to my friend, my coworker, our AI sourcing companion. This is a concrete example how we have also used AI internally to drive efficiency in the operations of Software & Cloud Sourcing. We are augmenting our licensing operations to drive faster workflows and reduce manual efforts of our people when it comes to quoting. What makes this very powerful is not the AI technology. It's the data that we have. We're sitting on over 20 years of proprietary intelligence, in this case, 41 million price points that we have, which is something that nobody can easily or at all replicate. What this now means to our team. This means they get actually an analysis from my friend here, the sourcing agent to basically what does this quote mean as well as what are the recommendations for the next best sourcing actions. We have rolled this out a couple of weeks ago, and we already have over 30% adoption, and we reduced the time to quote by 20%. In the next stage, we're bringing it up to 60% of all quotes to be automated and be helped, which we're predicting a 50% reduction in effort just around quoting. The ultimate goal, of course, is to drive a self-service going into the platform that you heard before, where customers can do this directly, faster quotes, fewer manual work, which means for us more scale and also better margins. And our people can actually focus on sales activities rather than creating quotes. Third phase of our flywheel is the Cloud Services. When customers move to the cloud, they never start from 0. They always carry years of legacy. And on the top of that, every time they move to the cloud, they introduce migration and security risk. Worse always has to happen fast without breaking the system and worse with all the regulations, not exposing data. And there is the reality of the skills gap as well as the fragmented operations because of that. Again, you see the same pattern, complexity, risk, and fragmentation hitting the customer all at once. So we help customers to not only build but modernize, manage, and secure their environment across a hybrid and multi-cloud landscape. And with that, with the prior steps that you have seen, the flywheel with IT cost management and software and cloud sourcing, we never keep the commercial terms and the cost saving out of sight for our customers, which is a true differentiator. Our role is clear to keep operations stable, secure, and continuously improving so the customer is always ready for the next step, which is often Data & AI on top of the Cloud Services. Let me introduce you to a customer, a college in the U.K., Barton Peveril. We often talk now about the end-to-end value, our life cycle, our flywheel. We're managing and optimizing their IT spend. We already found savings around licensing more than 10%, and we run in the cloud as well. We're helping them to turn AI into tangible business impact here for students and faculty. So with Barton Parallel, we really bring our full flywheel to life. So let's take a look what this means in practice. [ presentation ] So you have heard many things here, the entire flywheel, all the cycles that we have done as well as what we did advisory, professional services as well as managed services. The last piece that is missing of our flywheel is the Data & AI, which I will now introduce Alex Waldhaus to stage, our VP for Data & AI, who will walk you through that phase. Alex, over to you.

Thank you, Oliver. So, ladies and gentlemen, every company out there is asking the same question. It's not whether to invest into Data & AI. That chip has said the decision was made. But it's actually who do you trust to make things actually work. And that is what SoftwareOne is becoming, the AI operating partner for the enterprise. And over the next 10 minutes, I will show you what that means within our products, in our customer stories and last but not least, inside our own operations. Oliver just explained our strategic priorities. And this shows how data and AI sits within that story. AI transformation has a funding problem. Every CFO is asking where does the budget actually come from? And here at SoftwareOne, our response to that is actually built into our model. We find the savings first. cost optimization, smarter procurement and rigorous FinOps discipline. You heard Oliver, optimize to innovate. And for that reason, the customer does not need to choose between efficiency or transformation. We do both simultaneously, and the market opportunity is not subtle. The media and AI spend is going up from $7.6 million in 2024 to $16.6 million in 2026. That's Gartner. But every customer we talk to sits somewhere on that curve. And every one of them is running into the same problem. They are asking, how do I actually adapt to that? How do I manage the increasing architectural complexity? How do I govern all of this responsibly? And how do I scale my operations effectively? And here is now what surprises most of those people. The hard part is actually not about the model. Models almost became a commodity. We have enough models available. The hard part is the operating layer. It's about running your data and AI estate reliably at scale. It's about running your data and AI estate in complex environments, controlling the cost, and most companies underestimate this. Vendors are not built for this, but we are, and we have been building for this exactly moment. So we operate across three layers. The foundation layer where you find AI advisory, data platform architecture, governance frameworks, how do I license my AI estate. And last but not least, our SAM practice to govern all of this. The second layer, you see bespoke design and implementation, custom AI solutions built for specific customer context, not templates, not off the shelf, built for the clients' data, the clients' workflow and the client's individual risk profile. But on the third layer, that's where SoftwareOne is genuinely different. proprietary IP built on data assets that no competitor sold just to bring up again the 41 million price points we heard earlier about. Let me give you one example. Our AI agent, Aura, our upsell and renewal agent. This technology combines Microsoft propensity data and our transactional historical data to guide our sales force to the right customer at the right point in time to unlock meaningful conversations. We initially launched this across 150 sellers within our indirect channel business. And early signals were so strong that we decided to scale this tenfold. In the beginning, we focused on Microsoft Copilot for Business. Now we are expanding to Agent 365, Fabric and Foundry. And scaling tenfold is no pilot anymore. It became a strategic bet. And that is only the beginning. We are now moving into the next wave where we will give access to that technologies to our channel partners to achieve even a higher degree of scale. Commoditizing excellence, accelerating time to value, and defensible advantage at scale. Let me show you how that would actually look like on the ground. Sagrada Família, Barcelona, a UNESCO World Heritage site under active construction for over 140 years. Now imagine this, somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula, there is a stonemason carving a stone into a precise shape and form, up to the weight of 2 tons. Once the mason is done, it gets loaded to a truck, the truck drives to the construction site in Barcelona, a crane lifts everything up slowly, carefully. And I'll picture this, the stone does not fit. A deviation of 2 millimeters. On that specific construction site, you need to know each of stone has a designated spot where it needs to go. So every stone is made to order. That was the reality before SoftwareOne because the consequences get the stone back down, back on the truck, back to the stonemason and now either fix it or start from scratch. With SoftwareOne, the reality looks like this. We deployed 3D scanning technology plus highly trained and customized AI models across three stone masonry sites. Each and every stone gets quality checked prior to its shipping. So we identify the problem at the root cause, at the source, and not up in the air on the crane. Now I want to be transparent with you. That is not mass scale deployment. It's highly bespoke, actually matching that specific project. And it was built for one of the most famous and complex construction projects in the world. But it's also a testament to what AI advisory capabilities can lead to. You sit down with the client, understand their specific business challenge and find a pragmatic way to solve it to maybe even solve problems that are unique and have not been solved before. In cases like this, build trust. Trust opens doors, and open doors lead to scalable, repeatable business. As example, I use that story with every customer in manufacturing and visual quality inspection cases I can. It's every time. But let me show you how this actually leads to potential follow-up business. So now this matters for how you think about us as an investment. We don't just do this to our customers. We do this to ourselves. AI in everything we do in services and licensing operation. That is not a tagline. It is a commitment we are actively delivering on. Two examples, both live, both measured. Our EULA and IT contract analyzer, picture the modern enterprise dealing with thousands of documents that talk about licensing rules, terms of use, product use rights. High stakes if things get missed. We took our services practice and built it into our AI agent. We implemented 80 specific control criteria and automated the analysis process, guiding our consultants and folks to -- where to pay attention to and what step to take next with 99% accuracy, and 22% time saved per contract analyzed. The second example, let's take a look at automated billing CSP. As you maybe know, CSP billing is a complicated and difficult process. It is prone to errors if you do it manually. Here, we introduced a high degree of automation that allowed us to reduce the amount of people involved by 50%, but at the same time, gave us the ability to invoice faster. That is margin and customer experience simultaneously. By now, we have more than 7,000 AI agents live across our entire workforce based on Copilot Studio, but also the entire technology stack. Out of our AI use case funnel, we identified 179 use cases that are of such magnitude and impact to our business that they are now centrally sponsored, centrally developed and will be centrally deployed. Out of that, 7 cases are already live, 36 in development or active POC stage and 68 validated and ready for development. That is hundreds of people raising their hand. Hundreds of people saying, I know how AI can make my work better. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is cultural change. And cultural change is the hardest thing to actually replicate. So let me leave you with the market context that makes everything I've just shown you, not just relevant, but also urgent, and also presents an amazing opportunity for us. 60% of organizations already report unauthorized AI use inside their own walls. Complexity and governance are not future problems. They are happening right now. 50% of organizations are actively buying new AI tools and platforms right now. Software sourcing and licensing, the core of what SoftwareOne has been doing for 25 years, just got significantly harder, but also significantly more valuable. And AI infrastructure is growing at 29.2% annually throughout 2029. Every percentage point of that growth means more cloud complexity, more cost management needs, more migration and management demand. And all of that will land in our flywheel. AI services will reach $516 billion by 2029, a consulting CAGR of 17%. The demand wave is not slowing down. It's accelerating. AI does not disrupt SoftwareOne's model. AI accelerates it. The AI operating partner for the enterprise. That is what we are building. Oliver?

Thank you, Alex. So -- my favorite part, why do customers choose SoftwareOne? Because we solve a problem they're dealing with on a daily basis when it comes to software and what comes with it. They don't have the expertise because they focus on what they do best as a business. Just like us for the past 25 years. This is our industry. This is what we have been doing where we are best-in-class. We're on the pole position, as I mentioned, as the global #1 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SAM as well as for IDC to help the customer to implement software as a management and FinOps to be able to reduce 30% of that AI spend. You also heard AI is making sourcing and licensing more complex. Imagine what AI does for unmanaged SaaS solutions. It is growing. It is increasing the cost by 30%, unless they get the help of SoftwareOne to manage this from a cost, but also from an AI perspective. Regulation, security, vendor lock-in, AI is increasing the demand for multi-cloud by 60%, which demands for a provider who covers the entire flywheel, all of the four phases. And once again, driving simplification in that complexity. We are providing real value in AI through our data, as you heard, our knowledge, and our expertise. We want to monetize that, building IP. What customers don't need is another point partner and solution. What they need is a partner who sees this as a big picture, end-to-end and actually makes it work with the customer. So if we go back to our comparison throughout the presentation on our travel and airport analogy, you need a flight plan, you need the right routes and partners. You need the operations to run safely and reliably, and you need someone who keeps everything coordinated, so nothing happens or slows down and everyone reaches its destination. You need a partner who stays with you across the entire journey. We optimize to innovate, but we also innovate to optimize for customers and ourselves. This provides our customers, but also us, SoftwareOne, with a future-proof self-sustaining cycle, and that is why customers choose SoftwareOne. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.

So you have heard it now through the presentation, how organizations are actually trying to navigate across the complexity of the cloud vendors and also now AI all over the place, right? The real story comes from those who are living this day by day. And it's with great pleasure to welcome Roy Torheim, who is the Procurement and Operations Director at Visma. On stage, please. Thank you, Roy. A little bit about the business, about Visma before you can introduce a little more because it's a very cool company. They are -- they have over 160 software businesses across Europe and LatAm. So Roy brings a really real perspective on what it means to take technology, manage it with the partners and actually driving innovation in that kind of scale. So thank you very much for being here to take the travel and come and join everyone. Also, thank you for all your business we have done through the advisory, the licensing management, and the managed service. So it has been a true partnership with you, guys.

So thank you, Oliver. So at Visma, our focus is on empowering people and business through software. To do that, we need to stay focused on what we do best while navigating in an increasingly complex technology landscape. That's why strong partnerships like the one we have with you matter. This partnership help us move faster, make better decisions and create the foundation for innovation. And obviously, with AI creating new opportunities across our industry, having that foundation in place has never been more important. I guess it would be relevant to give the audience a short intro to who Visma is. Visma is actually the fifth largest software company and the largest cloud ERP player in Europe. We consist, as Oliver said, of more than 160 companies in 28 markets in Europe and Latin America, where we provide cloud ERP, payroll, and HRM to more than 2.5 million customers in SMB and local government market. That's Visma.

Thank you, Roy. So of course, with the presentation around the flywheel and the cycles, there's the first and prominent question is really the complexity that Visma is facing today with that fragmentation and with across the vendors, entities that you guys have, the cloud environment, but also how do you manage all of this internally?

Well, I'd just like to pick up one thing I sort of noticed from your speech. We don't like surprises, obviously. And surprises is coming more and more with the more complex landscape around the cost for AI. Obviously, our complexity comes from both our scale and operating model. We have, as I said, more than 160 companies operating with a high degree of autonomy. And that has been one of the reasons why we have been succeeded that well, but also means that we are managing technology decisions, governance and commercial agreements across a very decentralized organization. We are also operating in a true multi-cloud environment. We work obviously with Microsoft, Google, AWS and many, many other providers across the group. Different businesses within Visma have different requirements and different workloads and different technology strategies. As cloud consumption continues to grow, so does also have complexity. We need to balance flexibility, governance, cost and long-term strategic decisions across a large portfolio of companies. And could we do all this internally? Perhaps. But we see that our focus is to build software that our customers will continue to use and we want to serve our customers. So we rely on partners with deep specialist knowledge to help us navigate in this increasingly complex landscape and make better decisions faster.

Thank you for the insights. And of course, as I presented on the Software & Cloud Sourcing specifically, right, you have a very broad scale with all these companies. So how do you navigate that complexity with decisions around the vendors, whether it's technology or software since you're also developing? And how do you structure those agreements? And how do we bring value to you?

Well, I would say that one of the biggest area of value has -- that you has been helping us to make informed decisions across our vendor landscape. We can take a great example back in 2024, you helped us out to renegotiate our Azure agreement. And that project stands out because you could bring commercial insights, benchmarking, negotiation support and expertise around all these platforms that helped us to get a better outcome than we expected. Beyond that, you are obviously also helping us with around Microsoft licensing, which still is quite complex, I would say. We have helping us with enterprise agreements with CSP and also broader licensing strategy. However, what I would like to bring out more is that we value more is maybe the conversation around beyond licensing. We can discuss different vendor approaches, cloud strategies, commercial models and for us, having access to independent advice and market insights that helps us understand our options and make better decisions. As we continue to evolve toward a more decentralized consumption model, having that support help us balance local flexibility with group-wide governance and control.

So what has actually changed how we support Visma from the early advisory consulting approach to a more structured ongoing model that we're doing today and how does this actually impact you and Visma?

Well, I would say that the biggest change is that the relationship has become more strategic and continuous. So historically, engagements are focused on specific projects, transactions. Today, technology decisions are evolving constantly. Cloud economics change, as we have heard, where the strategies change and AI is creating entirely new opportunities and challenges. So what we value today is having a partner that understands our business and our operating model and can support us continuously rather than on renewal or negotiation points. That ongoing relationship gives us access to expertise when we need it, helps us make more informed long-term decisions and allow us to move faster. We run a fast-moving business, and we're dependent on working with partners that can join us on that journey, bring specialist expertise and help us to stay focused on our core competencies. To succeed with such a relationship, it is essential to build trust between us and our partners, something I would say we have managed to do with SoftwareOne.

Thank you. So the last question I have actually is more about Visma itself. So this foundation that you have built and really moving beyond our first engagement on cost control that you have now towards the innovation and that AI adoption that you have across the entire business and the software development. How does that look like today?

Well, this is where things becomes really exciting. For many, many years, conversations around technology focused primarily on efficiency and cost optimization. Those things remain important, of course. But today, the opportunity is much bigger. AI is creating one of the most significant shifts we have seen in our industry. And we view this as an opportunity, not as a threat. We have strong software platforms. We have structured data. We have deep domain expertise and talented people across the organization. And that puts us in a strong position to create value through AI. We are already investing heavily in AI enablement across the business with hundreds of employees participating in programs focused on practical use cases, obviously, in R&D support, but also across functions like finance, legal and content creation. There's a lot of uncertainty in the markets, but we believe this is the most exciting moments in our industry history. So rather than replacing software, AI is creating new opportunities to deliver more value to customers. Having the right cloud foundations, governance, structures, and technology partnership in place allow us to focus on innovation rather than administration. Optimization creates capacity, and that capacity can then be reinvested into innovation, product development and AI adoption at scale.

Thank you, Roy, for coming in, but also showing the audience. And of course, also thank you so much for your valuable partnership. And yes, we will be working further together, of course, on the AI.

Thank you.

So thank you, Roy, Oliver, and Alex for that insightful presentation. I hope you also found it interesting you in the audience and that you now have a better understanding of how we work with our customers throughout that life cycle and help create value. The next agenda point is very exciting. We will now do a deep dive into our channel business. This is a business that I know many of you are not that familiar with. But as Raffi and Melissa have already addressed and explained in their presentation, this is an area where we see significant growth potential. This is a highly scalable, highly profitable distribution machine. To present, I would like to welcome Guðmundur Aðalsteinsson up on stage. He's our Chief Sales & Partner -- Channel Partner Officer.

Thank you, sir. Thank you very much, Al, and thank you all for being here today. In an earlier section, Oliver talked about how we can help our customers navigate our industry complexity and take them through our optimize to innovate customer journey. I'm now going to focus on taking you through the channel business or distribution, which is a categorization that we fall into, I would say, often unfair because we do distribution quite differently than others. Channel is one of the most scalable business. It's a very capital-efficient growth engine in our business today. And I'll explain that in slightly more detail now. In for SoftwareOne, we reach out to customers through basically two routes. We sell directly to our customers, to upper mid-market and enterprise customers where we provide software and services. The second route, which you see at the bottom of the slide, is via distribution. This is where we sort of perform platform-based services with local expertise. We're focused on cloud technology from the top hyperscalers and a few other selected vendors through to partners who then own the end customer relationship. On the left-hand side, we have the vendors. These are the ones that build the technology. These are the Microsofts of the world, the AWS, the Google, and so forth. On the right-hand side, however, you have the customers who consume that technology. Those are both large and small customers as well. In the middle, however, this is where the machinery sits that connects the two distributors and partners. And this is what we refer to as our channel business. This, for the most part, is the same technology, reaching out to end customers, but a fundamentally different economic model. For SoftwareOne, the channel lets us extend our reach into the SMB segment, which is serviced by our partners. We talked about it before, over 200,000-plus customers. If you compare our direct account management team where you have an average, let's say, an account manager has 15 end customers, A partner account manager, which has 15 partners, is servicing over 200 per partner -- 200 customers per partner. So you can see the channel business scales way, way more than any of our other lines of business. So why does this matter for you as investors? Well, our channel business is a growth driver with revenues up to 18.7% year-on-year in constant currency. And the channel is highly profitable. It's an attractive model, platform-centric, scalable with global capabilities and local execution. It is really that scale engine for all the vendors who are trying to reach the SMB segment. And it's also very complementary to other business lines of SoftwareOne. It gives us full segment coverage and exposure to the ISVs and the product companies that really suit this model perfectly, growth, margin and reach, all from a business that is so much lighter to run than the direct. I spoke in my previous slide about the type of partners that we want to work with. And ideally, these are the ISVs. These are the ones that we build, they build their own products and their own IP. And not only do we provide them with access to vendors, they get a direct line to our domain expertise, which really helps them to get to market quicker. Partners choose SoftwareOne because their growth is at the center of our model. We've talked about cloud consumption. We're not all things to everyone. And in channel business, we are really focused on the top three hyperscalers because the complexity of the licensing of the services, of the programs, incentives, I mean, the list goes on, and it keeps on getting more and more complex. What is unique to us is having the right skill level on the ground to support our channel partners and always be adapting to the latest technology changes that are constant in this ever-evolving industry. And one of those things we've done to simplify that complexity is focus on platform excellence. And Melissa mentioned this earlier. Our platform takes the administration out of their business, so they spend more time with their customers. Our platform provides automated procurement, renewals and billing. And to leave you with a thought, we have about 1.5 man hour per month for manual operations to service all of our Microsoft CSP business with our platform. But that's not all. With the introduction of Cloudy, our intelligent AI assistant that is embedded within our customer and partner platform, we're bringing AI to the day-to-day partner operations in a very, very practical way. Rather than thinking about abstract use cases, Cloudy really helps the partners to interact with their data, surface insights, and make better decisions in real time. It continuously learns and improves and becomes a smarter assistant over time. Now Oliver talked about the customer journey flywheel and the services that wrap around it, which is also very, very relevant for our partners. They can now take our services offerings in a co-sell motion and land them with their end customers. And we extend our partner services portfolio, and we enhance their ability to build upon our services to create their own IP. Also, we leverage our partner services to deliver better outcomes for our own direct customers. So if there's one thing, and we talked about the channel being a new thing for SoftwareOne. There's one thing I really want you to kind of take away from what I've said today and what has been said earlier today is that the channel is one of the biggest opportunities for SoftwareOne. Distribution is shifting. Partners do not just want the typical transaction partners. They want true partnerships. So they want to do what's really best for -- focus on what's best for their customers, and we're helping them to take that complexity away. Vendors are continuing to consolidate. With the ever-changing program requirements, it's really, really difficult for partners to keep up. And a good example of this in the recent changes in the requirements from Broadcom, which has consolidated its partner business to very, very few players, which has in turn been very, very good opportunity for SoftwareOne. Local business relationship remain a key investment area for us. We need local relationships for speed, for effort, for the agility to respond to customer needs. But it's also the global nature of SoftwareOne, which is the opportunity for expansion into new markets and for our channel community. Raffi talked about the 25 markets that we're currently in. Approximately 98% of that market is Microsoft. We have a significant potential for growth in those markets, selling other hyperscaler solutions and our services portfolio. On top of that, as we are now one large combined company, we have 46 markets that are completely untapped, where we can drive exponential growth with our already proven channel business model. You heard a lot about AI. And I wonder, this is the biggest opportunity for this organization ever, and we've got the right model, and we've never been more relevant. AI is embedded in everything that we do. This includes our channel business, and it really plays to the mission of being an AI-powered business. But don't just take my word for it. I also have the privilege here to have one of our partners here today. Let me welcome to the stage, Thor, who is the CEO of Apro. Welcome.

Thank you.

Are we standing or are we get seats -- we get seats. Great.

Good. So I'll tell you a little bit about Apro. We are a search fund-backed company with 90 employees, and we specialize in cloud, DevOps, data and AI. We actually left our previous distributor to join with SoftwareOne because we needed a more hands-on and agile partner to match our growth potential.

Thank you very much for that. So far, so good, I assume.

Still going strong.

Still going strong. Well, you're here, so there must be something. All right. So let's tell us a little bit about Apro and how you -- what made you decide to partner differently with SoftwareOne...

So we work very closely with customers and the hyperscaler environment keeps getting more complicated. We want to maximize the time we have with our customers. And we also see opportunities that we would like to maybe explore further, bring to other markets and so forth. That's why we picked SoftwareOne.

Came to the right place for sure. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've learned building Apro and where those learnings have like taken the business?

Sure. So Apro is a business outcome-focused company, just like SoftwareOne. And we have proven success in Iceland with both AI and cloud. And in Iceland, actually, every company is essentially on SMB because the market is so small. So we've learned a lot in short time. And what has worked best for us is to move past the technical hype of AI and focus more on people and processes and enabling business users to create the AI value.

And that's interesting because, I mean, now having that opportunity to try this out in Iceland, often micro market with only 400,000 people. We're both from Iceland, by the way. So what did that teach you about, let's say, the gap between AI excitement and the real business impact of AI?

Yes. In my opinion, AI is all velocity today, but companies are hitting a wall because they lack direction. There is a huge value gap. And this is why we have built our own best practices and platform that we call the Lighthouse.

Lighthouse is a very, very interesting project, might I say? How would you say -- because now we look at -- we've talked a lot about AI here as SoftwareOne, our DNA being sort of optimized to innovate and innovate to optimize. How would you say that your IP complements the business of SoftwareOne?

Yes. So the Cloud IQ is great to manage the cost of the hyperscalers. But the landscape is, as everyone has said here, getting more complicated. So our platform actually enables us to have a more granular control of how you're using AI and spending on it. Tokens are being spent in a lot of different ways. You have agents, you have software development, chats and so forth. So companies need to manage those costs to measure the value that you're actually getting from AI. We are one of those companies, for example, on the product development side of the Lighthouse, we wanted to capitalize the cost of using those tokens. So you need to get the kind of granular oversight to be able to do that.

Yes. And let's talk about AI, what is Apro then doing to be relevant in the market demand? And how do you see the future of our partnership growing?

So the AI needs of our customers, they are a moving target. To be relevant, we must stay ahead of the curve. And right now, we have a proven model in Iceland. The Lighthouse is working there. We have 20-plus customers with monthly subscription fees. It gives us access to upsell opportunities, and it drives cloud adoption. So now with you, with SoftwareOne, we are trying to see if this can be replicated to new markets, if other partners like us can use this with their clients.

Which is a very exciting project, and we're really happy to work on that with you. But I mean, we're all -- I mean, I'm not sure if you want to speculate, but do you have any wise words or final thoughts about what's going to happen in the world?

Yes. I think the key is to think big, but you need to start small and then you need to scale fast. And in our case, I think we can do that with SoftwareOne. So we obviously want to get something from this partnership, too.

Yes. You mean about time or Yes. We'll deliver that. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time, and wish you all the best.

Take care.

Thank you so much, everyone. For our next speaker, I welcome Nina, our Chief Human Resources Officer. Welcome to the stage.

Good afternoon, and a warm welcome from my side. My name is Nina Janorschke, and I'm the Chief HR Officer at SoftwareOne. And I'm pleased to be here with you today to share about our talent. At SoftwareOne, everything we do starts with our people. It's their expertise, their mindset and the culture that brings it all together. They are one of our truest competitive advantages and at the heart of our success. But to understand SoftwareOne's unique ability to scale and execute, we have to start with our people. And we clearly see that we are stronger than the market on the average factors you see on screen. But what does that entail? Today, our team consists of more than 12,000 people. That is a global workforce that combines scale with strong expertise and continuity. Our median tenure is at 8.6 years versus the 2.5 years on market average. And that is a very strong indicator for our ability to really retain critical knowledge and the right talent in our organization. Our average age is in line with market, and that is above -- no, that is slightly below 39 years. And our female representation is at 34% versus the 27% we see on market average. That is again a very strong evidence that we are building a more balanced and competitive talent base. We're also operating on a truly global level, as you already heard, with the 70-plus countries we represented in. Our largest workforce is in APAC with 29%, followed by 16% each in DACH and LatAm. We have 14% in WEMEA and across Nordics and CEE, we see 10% each, followed by 5% in Noram. That regional diversity gives us both reach, but also the local relevance as we use all levers of a really continuous globally connected workforce. Most importantly, we have built the right skills and expertise, and they are highly differentiated. We have more than 700 ITAM and FinOps specialists amongst us, and they're representing the largest ITAM practice globally. We have more than 12,000 certified employees amongst us, and they have certifications in Microsoft, AWS and Google. And we also have over 350 data and AI practitioners. And because market leadership require us to have a continuous reinvention, we continue to invest in learning and upskilling of our people. We're averaging 11.5 training hours per employee, and we see that our leaders visibly participate in training themselves. Altogether, this gives us a workforce that is not only global and experienced, but also ready for the next phase of our growth. What further sets SoftwareOne apart is something that is a bit harder to quantify, but incredibly powerful, and that is our unique value-driven culture. At the core of it is our one company, one team mindset. After the integration of 2 former competitors, we're now operating as one team. And that is not just in structure, it is truly in mindset. Our people care for one another, they support one another and they take ownership. And they always go beyond their individual roles to collectively support each other and work on something with a true entrepreneurial mindset. So when our people stand up for each other and work towards a shared purpose, we create something very distinctive. And that is the connected community we see amongst us. That connected community helps us to deliver for our customers and for each other as we always go the extra mile. We're also clearly guided by our values. And you have seen the slide before, it is super important that we foster that impact we're trying to create. That is fostered through integrity, momentum, passion, accountability, customer focus and trust. And what you see on slide, they are statements, but that's just not what we live by it. These were strongly curated things by our leadership team collectively with all of our colleagues worldwide, and we did that right when we started the integration because we wanted to build that foundation that builds a strong, strong start for us to actually make decisions, to collaborate with each other and to always perform as one team. They also create that consistent foundation across, as we build our global organization and fuel the impact we strive to make on a day-to-day basis. And that continues to foster the next phase of our growth. On top of that, we truly embrace diversity. We see it as one of our core strengths and a strategic enabler in our business. That is why we are committed to further build an inclusive workplace that is something where different perspectives are actually valued and people feel that they can be their true selves, that they are valued and bring the impact to the day-to-day business activities they're operating in. We do this through dedicated measures internally, that is DIB in all hiring and promotional practices, our employee resource groups and global awareness campaigns. And we do not only do this to continue to attract top talent, we also do it because the customer needs are getting more and more complex and diverse. And that way, we can answer them in the right way. And I think why culture can be described with these 3 distinctive examples, it is best experienced. So we added the voices of our people who get to experience and live the uniqueness of SoftwareOne on a day-to-day basis, although they do it in different roles, functions and scopes. And last but not least, I would like to reiterate the important role of people and culture as a true strategic driver of our performance, of our growth and the company culture we would like to see. We really believe that our scalable success is brought in by the right combination of a strong human-centric culture and the retention piece. And retention comes in because we have a deliberate investment and the right capabilities needed for the next phase of our growth. This combination for us is not accidental, it is a conscious choice. We are focused on literally building a future-ready workforce across 3 key dimensions, and we deliver that with a team of over 300 people and culture experts together with the leadership team and colleagues. What are these 3 key dimensions? First, it is leadership and retention. We invest in the right leadership capabilities needed for the AI-driven world. That is a leader that fosters trust, transparency, but also gives a clear direction. We always ensure that we operate as one team while always maintaining a strong human connection. Because in a transforming environment, we see leadership is the anchor to literally create that future readiness. And second is our AI capabilities. We invest heavily in the development and career from all our people. And we are equipping our leaders and all our people to actually work with the skills needed to thrive in the AI-driven world. We want them to work smarter. We want them to move faster, and we want them to make greater impact. But how do we do this? We do it through structured AI learning journeys. We also do it through responsible, ethical AI, and we also build generative and agentic AI skills across our organization. What we do as well is that we lever AI on all of our development and coaching activities to actually make them more scalable and also more personalized across the globe. And third, it is the AI-driven workforce transformation. We recognize that AI is really reshaping every workforce, including our own. And our approach is to combine the best of both worlds. It's the flexibility, the creativity and the judgment we get from our people with the power of AI, always applied responsibly and at scale. The strongest organization of the future will be the ones that get this balance right. And our ambition is to make sure that AI can reshape our existing roles because we see it as an evolution and also a lever to literally focus on the strategic impact of our work tasks. We're optimizing our workforce composition. So ultimately, our strength is not just technology and it's not just our people, it's how we combine the best of these worlds and bring it all together in a very intentional and thoughtful manner. These people on the slide are, again, showing our culture in action. They're demonstrating genuine care, collaboration and high-performing teams and true empowerment across our organization. And for me, this is what truly defines us. It is a company I can deeply identify with, a culture that I genuinely believe in and an organization I'm incredibly proud to be part of. Thank you for having me today. [Presentation]

Okay. So now we have been given a lot of information from several of our management team, from our customers and our channel partners.

We will now have the first Q&A session of the day. And if you would like to ask a question, anyone in the room, just raise your hand and we will provide you with a microphone. We will then open up for questions from the online audience. And with that, I give the word to Ines (sic) [ Nooshin ] from Deutsche Bank, if someone can provide her with a microphone.

Nooshin Nejati from Deutsche Bank. So you highlighted a strong revenue synergy pipeline and cross-sell opportunity across the life cycle. Can you share early examples where this is already translating into tangible revenue wins and how you think about scaling that motion over time? And one more, please. You have highlighted Channel as a scalable and profitable growth driver while it still represents only 8% of the total revenue. Looking 3 years out, is there a realistic path for Channel to become a materially larger contributor to the group mix? Or should investors think of it as a high growth but still relatively small business? And as you scale into remaining markets, how should we think about the pace of rollout versus the margin profile? And what would be the key constraint to faster scaling?

Thank you very much for the questions. Around the revenue synergies, let me start with that, we always mentioned that also in our quarterly updates, it's in a way, difficult to quantify. But for sure, on one side, and I've mentioned it earlier, we see good growth results already looking back into the last 2 quarters, and we have certainly a good momentum. If we talk about examples, let me take both portfolios, which we took together, right? So as an example, in SoftwareOne, we have a SoftwareOne cloud support, which we offer to our customers. This is something, which the Crayon customer base very much is embracing. We are doing a lot of upselling of those kind of cloud support services into, let's say, the legacy Crayon customer base. This is a typical example. Another example is our ISV and vendor certifications, which we have, let's say, many, many more on a truly global scale, which gives us, in some regions and areas, a more competitive pricing compared to, let's say, the past. Those are other examples where we start to see the realization of the potential, let's say, in terms of revenue synergies of the 2 companies coming together. In terms of Channel, you are right, in a way, it's 8% of the total business, right? But that's also the opportunity. At the same time, I think, for us to gain further market share and to have accelerated growth in the combined company. And that's certainly something which is part of our 2030 plan. We see it as the fastest-growing business line today. We also see it moving forward as the fastest-growing business line. So I think -- we think if you look into our projections, we think the Channel business will grow faster as the direct business. And therefore, also the mix is slightly shifting. And that should also help, by the way, from an overall EBITDA margin profitability perspective and make a slightly positive impact. Did we answer your questions? Good.

This is Ines from BNP Paribas. I just had one question. It was very interesting because you're basically developing internally some agents for internal purposes. But eventually, you will sell them eventually to external customers. On a 5-year time frame, aren't you scared of cannibalizing your own revenue and services? Is services going forward at the industry level is going to be the growth tailwind for resellers? That's what I understand right. So what's your view on a 2-year or 5-year time frame?

Well, it's a good question. So the answer is yes. Of course, we're building agents internally. I always say we have to start with ourselves before we take it to customers because then we're going to be in a much better position to actually deliver and sell it as a product. So the example that was shown earlier with end user license agreements, these types of concepts we've built internally, and then, we test it and we take to customers. To answer your question around cannibalization, I mean, certainly, I think the technology shifts have adopted and changed. I mean, a year ago, we didn't even see agentic AI at the levels that it is now. And I think that, call it, the shifts will continue to evolve over the next 5 years. We see this as a way for us to actually create far more revenue, I think, synergies, also help us streamline the costs so that we're much more efficient and productive, which also implies to our EBITDA margin over time. I think it's always difficult to say what the world will look like in 5 years, but certainly, this is something that we will continue to evolve, and we think have that proven capability over the last 25 years to continue to do so.

And just is this something that your competitors are already doing typically? Are you a bit ahead of the curve?

I would say in these specific use cases, we haven't seen our competitors deliver them to date. So the example that we talked about with Agent AURA, which is a CSP renewal agent, we were the first to market to deliver that and did that together in joint partnership, of course, with Microsoft. So we need to be ahead of the curve without a doubt. And I think this is where the insight and capability of our people that Alex Waldhaus talked about in terms of bringing up these internal use cases, really understanding where do we think we're going to have the most impact is critical so that we have speed and time to market.

Any other questions from the audience in the room?

Everyone wants to go for coffee.

It's Andreas Wolf, Berenberg. Could you speak about the automated billing, especially in CSP, and how it helps you to lower working capital and improve the order to cash process?

Yes, it's a great question. And we think it's SoftwareOne, but I think it's a good example of the Channel business and where we saw automation with CSP. So in the Channel business, we automate CSP billing from end to end. So it is highly scalable. We do not have the human necessity necessarily. But it also really makes sure that, that time to cash is efficient. And we see that in terms of the historic working capital performance of Crayon as a stand-alone business. Now fast forward, what we're doing is we're taking that insight, and we're building that all together as one SoftwareOne. So creating much more streamlined operations. So over time -- I mean, clearly, cash is so critical to our business, and we stay very committed on net working capital. So we should see that transcend to more efficiency and time to processing, especially around areas like CSP.

And one follow-up, if I may. If we look at your medium-term targets, the high mid -- high single-digit growth rate, how should we think about the Microsoft revenue share in 4 years from now?

Well, today, Microsoft is 60% of our total revenue mix overall. We still see Microsoft to be vital, and we'll talk about that later today in our session with Microsoft. We need to continue to grow that, but it's also about expanding into other multi-vendor and attaching on behalf of on total Microsoft estate. I always say every customer needs Excel. So it's really difficult to say when you don't need Microsoft in-house. So it's so important for us to be able to continue that growth, but also see additional opportunities to support our customers across software vendors, but also other cloud providers. So I think we could safely say that 60% is a healthy, strong number and puts us in a unique position to continue to drive additional growth. Any comments?

Yes. Maybe to add on, it's very important for us, of course, to stay agnostic and independent, right? And it's also a bit dependent on the customer demands out there and what our customers really want. And that defines then that mix to some extent. But at the end of the day, I would say we have a very broad vendor portfolio, which gives us a lot of possibilities also in the future.

[indiscernible] here. I have the question just on the vendor side. Could you talk a bit about how the relationship with Anthropic and the other sort of model vendors is developing? And how that is working? That would be very interesting.

Yes. So we've just started an initial partnership with Anthropic. You may have seen that covered on the vendor slide. And we see this as incredibly accretive to our overall business. As Raffi just rightly stated, it's all about customer choice. In the end, it's about being independent and being in a position to advise and support the customers accordingly. With Anthropic, we certainly see that to be critical because especially when it comes to applied research or deep custom, let's say, project-based research that you want to use Cloud for, Anthropic, of course, is -- has a leg up. But when you look at the development of LLMs and AI overall, it's a vast playing field, and it's starting to really differentiate. Microsoft with Agent 365 has access into Anthropic with their partnership. So that also builds on our Microsoft space to continuously have that as essential. So in the U.S. market, we are continuing to, let's say, pursue this because that's the starting basis of our relationship with Anthropic. And we want to, of course, have it globally.

[ Andre ] from ING. Maybe a follow-up on that one. Does that mean that you will not aim to work with other LLM providers or OpenAI, just to mention one, or Perplexity? So that's one. And the second is AI was mentioned quite a lot. So I think that was made clear. But your added value on AI is going to the likes of my company and say, "Hey, I will let you know how you optimize in." Token economics is, thus, one of the first things you mentioned, Melissa. So if you just can really explain again what exactly -- how -- I mean, a concrete example as to how you help your customers with AI spend, for example?

Yes. Great question. So Anthropic has decided to do a partner -- extension of a partner model. So that's why we're continuing to pursue it. Of course, we advise across any LLM. So whether you want to use Perplexity, whether you want to use Gemini, Copilot, any of the case. And I think the reality is that most companies will end up having multiple models in-house. I mean, certainly, that's our experience today. Depending on, let's say, the specific need, we will go to different LLMs depending on that need. And so that's where I think that advisory comes into play. When it comes to, let's say, ING, which is a valued customer, but also a bank for us, it's important that we continue to advise around that cost. So yes, so helping with negotiation around what to buy. So when Oliver talked about that full life cycle, sourcing across the multi-cloud estate, but also the vendors, and then, of course, reducing costs. And these are things that we provide capabilities today, and we'll continue to do so. And I think in the world of token economics, this is something that with compute costs being so volatile and energy costs also being high, data centers are just -- there's just not enough data centers there. So the costs are continuing to be very high. We believe we have the position to really support because of that cost optimization background that is really who we are to assess that, the tokens and spend. We're moving into a world where I believe it will be very much managed like travel and entertainment budget where each headcount will have a certain allocation of tokens. So these are things that we are building IP around today through agents so that we can help our customers and advise in the world of tokenomics.

Okay. It seems like there are no further questions from the audience in the room. So then, I would like the operator to open up for the online audience.

We now have a question from the line of Christopher Tong from UBS.

I guess my question is on the EBITDA margin targets of 28%. So it's quite a big step-up. So I was just wondering if you could provide some of the drivers of this, either by segment or what you want to do with headcount given all these efficiencies.

Yes. Thank you. Maybe I can start. And -- I mean, if you bear with us for the other, let's say, 1, 2 hours, which we have ahead of us, our CFO will give much more insights on how we achieve this and how we deliver this, and there will be a Q&A afterwards as well. But I mentioned already before, let's say, the shift which we see Channel business, our most, let's say, strongest growth business line for the next years, which is also our business line with the highest EBITDA margin. That should obviously help, that shift, that accelerated growth. The business mix shift should slightly help to improve EBITDA margin. We mentioned before about AI in everything we do. And also that will obviously help to gain efficiencies over the years. And for sure, also our overall services portfolio is something where we see room for improvement to achieve higher EBITDA margins throughout the course of 2030.

We have no further questions at this time.

Okay. Then that concludes the Q&A session and the first part of our program. We will now have a short break. When you come back, we will shift the focus a bit. We will invite our regional managers from DACH, NORAM and APAC up on stage to give you a regional spotlight and better insight into how they drive the business on the ground in the regions that they manage. Following that, you will have Melissa and Ms. Nicole Dezen from Microsoft on stage for a fireside chat. And then, of course, the last presenter of the day, the man that you're all waiting for, our CFO, Hanspeter Schraner. I ask you to be back here at 4:30 for the second part of the program. Thank you. [Break]

Hello. I'm Brian Moats. I lead Global Commercial Sales and Partners at Broadcom Software. I'd like to take a moment to share my perspective on SoftwareOne and how their evolution is so critical to the VMware-related demand we see. So here's the context. Enterprise leadership faces a massive challenge. As public cloud costs escalate and AI demand surge, organizations are moving towards sophisticated hybrid and private cloud environments. But managing these shifts creates intense architectural and economic complexity. Our joint customers need a partner who can help them navigate and transition safely and cost effectively. This is why SoftwareOne continues to evolve in our opinion. The market knows them as a powerhouse in software sales and management backed by service practices like application migration to public cloud. And as hybrid infrastructure and private cloud have become the new corporate standard, SoftwareOne is tracking to that demand. So we work together to accelerate that evolution, ensuring that they expand their private cloud capabilities at a pace that the market requires. What makes their response so compelling is how we're doing it. SoftwareOne is making significant incremental investments in private cloud services while leveraging their established public cloud migration expertise. This existing muscle side is highly transferable. In what they know about moving applications, they're scaling to help customers, our mutual customers architect the optimal mix of hybrid and private cloud. For Broadcom, this ability is vital. It means that SoftwareOne can quickly help customers optimize their stakes and unlock the capital needed to fund the relation. To me, this is an intelligent story for us. They are leveraging a proven foundation to capture massive sustainable market. As they scale these infrastructure services, they are transferring into an end to end multi-cloud partner through this highly responsive, and that's what Broadcom needs. I wish I could be there in person with all of you. Hope you are having productive conversation. Thank you.

Good. Thank you very much. You are all back in the room. The room is still packed. So very happy that you are sticking around. Over the next, I think, 1 hour, we are going to have a little bit more interaction. So we will bring some people on stage. We have some of the regional presidents joining soon on the regional spotlight. And afterwards, we have Melissa and our special guests, Nicole from Microsoft joining us on stage. Before we go into the spotlight, I want to provide some perspectives first around our, I would say, local delivery capabilities. One of SoftwareOne's unique strengths is the combination of global reach and local expertise. We have talked about this already. Our customers are increasingly operating across multiple countries facing complex technology environments and rising regulatory requirements. They need a partner that can support them consistently around the world. At the same time, technology transformation is ultimately delivered locally. Success depends on understanding the local market conditions, regulation, language, local culture and customer requirements. That's why local expertise matters just as much as global scale. SoftwareOne brings both together like no one else in the industry. We combine a global platform, global vendor relationships and a worldwide delivery capabilities with teams that are deeply embedded in their local markets. In all our 70-plus countries, we have feet on the ground, means local sales and local delivery capabilities. On top, we have regional delivery centers, which ensure further scale and competitiveness. This slide here illustrates the power of global reach and local expertise. We don't see this just as a differentiator. It's a competitive advantage that is actually difficult to replicate. With this, I would now like to invite some of our -- we call them internally local heroes, our regional presidents, on stage, Patrick from DACH, Regina from North America and Varun from APAC. And -- we discussed a lot about growth, revenue growth. You have seen our Ambition 2030. And yes, we want to be -- hear a bit more from our local heroes on how they want to make it happen in their markets. Good. Maybe we start with a quick introduction, just a few words about yourself.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Patrick Kaegi, like Kagi Fret. Obviously, I'm from Switzerland. I'm very happy to be here. I started my career in the telecom industry. But to be honest, I spent almost my entire career in SoftwareOne. I'm here since 16 years plus. And since 1.5 years, I'm leading and serving the DACH region.

Good afternoon. I'm Regina Manfredi. I have the honor of serving the North American market. And I have been in the Microsoft ecosystem for over 20 years and started the U.S. channel for Crayon. So thanks for the Channel questions. And I'm happy to be here today. Thank you for including North America, Raffi.

Of course. Thank you.

My name is Varun Paliwal. I come from a very small region, APAC, just 15 countries, countless languages, and as you might have noticed on the slide, 29% of APAC's global workforce. I spent almost half of my 23 years of professional career at SoftwareOne, including an entrepreneurial stint. And exactly the reason why I'm so happy and passionate to be around is just the amazing people and the entrepreneurial spirit we have in this company. So thank you for inviting me here.

Thank you all. Great.

So maybe we start with the combination of bringing really Crayon and SoftwareOne together as one. And I think we are all eager to understand what that really means in your markets. How did the combination really help you accelerate? How did it help you maybe in your markets to win or cross and upsell into your customer base? You had some questions about revenue synergies. So I'm sure the audience is very interested to hear your perspectives from a local market perspective. Maybe Varun, we start with you.

I think it's a good point to start from, Raffi. As you are aware, SoftwareOne and Crayon both had a very strong presence across APAC. So it was a complex integration that we ran for the last 12 months. But we're now beginning to see the results of this very successful integration that we ran. We are seeing some of the fastest growth we have witnessed over a period of time. The combination has given us access to a wider market base, a broader portfolio and access to new customers and partners that we have never ever accessed in the past. And this is happening consistently across the 15 countries that we operate in, across our transaction and services business. I would like to dive a little bit deeper into the services business because it's the fastest-growing business line for SoftwareOne in APAC. Because of the combination, one, we are able to sell more not only to our existing direct customers, but also to a larger customer base that is now accessible through our partner ecosystem. Second, we are able to deliver services faster. This is key because it allows us to recognize revenue faster than ever. And fundamentally, if you see what is happening for SoftwareOne in APAC is that we are winning services faster than we are able to build delivery capacity. The combination of these 2 companies coming together has given us both the capacity and the capability from our partner ecosystem to now accelerate the revenue delivery for the services business that we are winning. The third piece is about being future ready. And we seriously believe that if you want to have the right to exist, we constantly need to innovate and modernize on our service delivery engine. We have combined the security capability of SoftwareOne with the data and AI capabilities of Crayon to build a highly scalable, secure and agentic delivery model that will allow us to really be relevant and profitable in the market for the next 3 to 5 years. So in essence, Raffi, we see that we are able to scale faster, operate leaner and structurally deliver higher profitability across the region.

Very good. I think the audience likes to hear that. Very good. Regina, maybe you want to share your experiences in North America.

Well, we're really excited in North America because we feel like this is where the growth can compound the fastest. So speaking of revenue synergies, when you think about the growth that Crayon experienced in U.S. in 2025, we had nice double-digit growth. And we did that in 2 market segments that really are going to fuel the engine of the business going forward. And that's the mid-market and the channel. And the reason why we think that's important is because on the SoftwareOne side, we have strength in the enterprise space, nonprofit and SMB. And so when we take those 2 platforms and bring them together, that means more. It means more reach. It means more opportunities, as it relates to multi-vendor, AI specifically and our IT portfolio management. IT asset management is where we are a true Gartner and IDC leader in the North American space, and it actually physically shows up on the P&Ls of our customers, and it matters. And then when you marry that with our channel partners, we don't compete with our channel. We actually truly partner to grow and create win-win situations for our customers. And that channel becomes a force multiplier because we leverage each other's strength in the market. They buy their Microsoft CSP, their Google through us. Yes. But then they leverage the strength of our IT portfolio management as well as our services to help their customers win. And it's a win-win-win for everyone involved. And we really believe that having the more resources together and more segments are going to drive tremendous scale for us.

Fantastic. Let's turn the conversation a bit around our midterm revenue growth. We just announced the high single-digit revenue growth midterm. And maybe you can elaborate a bit how -- what are the key drivers to achieve that in your markets and how you basically want to contribute? Maybe, Patrick, we'll start with you.

Yes. Maybe let's distinguish between the reselling, so the transactional side and the services side roughly. On the transactional side, we are clearly acting out of a strengthened position in the DACH region because we are a market leader in 2 out of 3 countries. So in Germany and Switzerland, we are a market leader in multi-vendor and Microsoft distribution already. Whilst in Austria, we are very strong in the enterprise segment today. So this gives us access to a very broad customer base with existing good relationships. And the answer on that can clearly only be that we have to increase the share of wallet per customer in the reselling area. So we are expecting to grow laterally across the market in line with publishers. We do have dedicated presales teams, of course, with Microsoft; Broadcom VMware, we heard him before; Citrix; Adobe; and especially with the security vendors like CrowdStrike, Sophos, Trellix or Trend Micro, which changed the name to TrendAI recently. Moving towards services. I think one of the biggest strengths of the DACH region is a very diverse portfolio. We have multiple bets to play on. We heard optimize to innovate circle. And let me maybe highlight some service lines, which are not mentioned today. In particular, we have a very strong support offering called multi-vendor premium support, which is fueled by the demand of customers asking for affordable support in Microsoft and also other multi-vendor solutions. We do have HMS contributing significantly, where we manage hybrid and on-premise workloads for bigger accounts. And of course, the strongest one in services motion is the EA to CSP to services. We heard a lot about AI already. Of course, we want to capture business automation needs from customers through our dedicated AI teams. And yes, so I believe, as I said, this combination of strong position in licensing and combination with services is underpinning our ability to deliver short, mid- and long-term growth.

Thank you. Regina, I mean, you went through quite a turnaround in North America. I would say the investor community is very aware of that. And we are all, I think, including me, relieved about the Q1 result back to growth and the impact you make. Thank you for that. But maybe you can elaborate a little bit more on how you -- from a turnaround situation now back to growth, and how you want to kind of have sustainable growth in your region?

In North America, we -- it was a team effort. The first 6 months through the integration were a true team effort, and we have strong leadership in North America, and I'm proud of what the team has accomplished as one company. And that takes quite a bit of work, as you all know, through an integration. It was all about sales execution and a new management system and driving greater discipline around that sales execution to amplify the value proposition of the combined SoftwareOne and the combined company. So we started the year, we started -- last August, we decided that we were going to really double down on 4 top priorities in North America for FY '26. And those included our ITAM capabilities because we had substantial bench strength, our multi-cloud capabilities because we know that our customers need us to meet them in a multi-cloud environment as well as a multi-AI environment because the demand, as you guys are probably aware, is astounding, especially in our market. And the fourth one is around channel. 40% of the net new logos in North America in Q1 were referred to us by our channel partners. So that is a compounding growth that is really a force multiplier, as I mentioned before. So it allows us to double down in SMB and mid-market because that's where customers are really experiencing the most complexity. They don't have the resources. They're very constrained. They're trying to figure out which LLM do I use, how am I going to figure out AI, how do I secure it, how do I govern it. And they're really needing an adviser to come and sit alongside them, get them ready for AI, secure it, govern it and make sure that they get the ROI that they need. I'll give you an example. There was a customer in Q1 that is the largest freight -- privately held freight company in North America, and they were struggling with cost, and they wanted to deploy AI. Specifically, they were looking at Copilot and other LLMs. And so we came and sat alongside them and helped them build a road map and a plan. We took their enterprise agreement and transitioned it to a cloud services provider solution together with support, and we also helped them create a road map, leveraging the Microsoft programs that could fund the services that were needed for them to innovate. So they put in $1.1 million back in the P&L so that they could innovate and accomplish their goals. And we helped them figure out how to leverage Copilot with Claude Cowork for their enterprise. And now, we're moving forward with other solutions and multi-vendor with them. And that's what we do. We meet them at the cost crisis, and we support them along the way.

Very exciting example. Thank you for sharing the insights. Can you tell us just a little bit more about what that all means now from a midterm growth perspective for North America?

Well, from a midterm perspective, I believe that we have a real opportunity when it comes to continuing down the multi-cloud, multi-agentic advisory services that we provide. But we have a good pipeline of acquisitions that are actionable, and we're going to try to leverage that to build out the AI bench strength that we have within our organization. And we can't forget the channel and how we can continue to leverage the strength of how we partner differently than the traditional distributors to create that win-win-win combination.

Thank you, Regina. Varun, over to APAC. I mean, you have obviously delivered consistent growth. If we look backwards, nice growth. I guess the question for you is, how do you keep it up? Or how do you really accelerate the pace even further?

Yes. So thank you for that question, Raffi. I think we are looking to continue the momentum in APAC. There are 2 simple ways of keeping the momentum going. One is we need to continue to add new customers and partners. And second, we need to go broader and deeper with our existing customers and partners. When we look at the strength of channel that we are bringing, we still have certain markets in APAC where we can expand the channel presence. And that's the first task we are looking at doing right now because the channel presence allows us to really go into the untapped SMB market and start adding more and more customers to the multiplier effect that we get to the channel business. We are also seeing certain markets and market segments where there's a lot of untapped potential for new customer acquisition. In these markets, we are making investments on a hunting team that is primarily goaled on net new customer acquisition. Now, when we look at how do we go deeper, broader with our existing customers, we know we operate in a position of strength with Microsoft. That's been the core pillar of our business. But we are also now building and implementing services and solutions on the other 2 hyperscalers. In addition, we also have 8 to 10 strategic ISVs that we are working to build solutions as well as building presales capability around it. So all of this fundamentally gives us the ability to accelerate the selling motion that we want to drive in our existing customers' partners, and we spoke about continuing this momentum, Raffi. I believe we really need to build and look at long-term strategic contracts with our customers' partners, and that's where our managed services offering becomes very critical. And fundamentally, we are investing in modernizing that managed service offering for specific customer requirements in APAC to be able to continue with this momentum. I think with all of this, we are very confident of continuing the momentum that you have seen with APAC over the last few quarters.

I mean, all of you touched a bit on customer segments, and let's dive a bit more into these topics. I think we would be interested to understand which of the customer segments you foresee providing you most of the growth opportunity and how you also kind of service attach in some of the customer segments. Maybe, Patrick, we start with you.

Yes. This is clearly a tough question, Raffi, because looking at the data, currently, the 3 segments, corporate, enterprise and public sector, are equally strong in DACH, contributing around about 32% of net revenue. That leaves 4% for SMB and channel. So the answer should be SMB and channel, obviously. We had that topic before. We are planning to invest into channel as well. And coming back to the combination, I see that Cloud-iQ is really well perceived in the market. We made it available already to the SoftwareOne client base, and we are building on that, of course. Moving to enterprise, corporate and public sector. A lot of growth was delivered in the past from public sector, and we are foreseeing continuous demand in that area. Why? Because public sector institutions are still early in their modernization journey. Topics like sovereignty, AI, and of course, modernization of application and infrastructure are an ongoing topic for them. And with our diverse portfolio, we believe we are perfectly structured to capture these opportunities. Moving to corporate and enterprise finally. The sweet spot for many publishers is clearly corporate. That's where most publishers really want to partner with us. That's also where the EA to CSP motion to services lends the best. So clearly, we have a focus there. And as well in enterprise, I mean, IT complexity is not decreasing, it's increasing, and that fuels the demand for advisory or consultancy or managed services. And as you heard with our portfolio, we believe we are very well positioned there as well. So we plan to grow in all the 4 segments.

Varun, what's your perspective?

So for us in APAC, we're seeing growth in all market segments, including enterprise, corporate, SMB and public sector. But we are going to have a special focus on the underserved mid-market. You spoke about services, Raffi, right? In this segment, when we are meeting our customers, we are seeing a very clear demand for them asking SoftwareOne to not only consult, but also deliver the services that we are really talking about can make an impact. So what we are now beginning to do is we are beginning to unleash the full power of our portfolio in this customer segment. We typically start with an advisory or a consulting service, then we really deliver value for the customers through a professional services project. And eventually, we see the long-term contract with them through a managed service offering. So fundamentally, the entire range of what SoftwareOne can offer is something we are able to sell in this customer base. And what we are also seeing is that we are typically operating in the CHF 100,000 to CHF 1 million services deal. And our contribution margin on the services that we're selling in this space is the highest amongst all. So that's the reason we want to improve our profitability also in services, and we are going to really double down on this particular segment. The other segment, which is offering us a meaningful upside, is public sector and regulatory markets. And in this case, we are seeing increased demand through local AI adoption through sovereign cloud and through the demand from customers for local technology ecosystems. And that is where the local presence of SoftwareOne is really giving us the leverage to service them in the way they want.

Thank you very much. I mean, looking into the regions, obviously, we have regional differences, right? I mean, North America, DACH, we are operating really in 2 or 3 countries versus in APAC, it's like, I think, 16 markets or countries where we are operating in. And I was wondering maybe, Varun, Regina, can you elaborate a little bit? Does this require a distinct approach on how you engage with customers and vendors?

Yes. Maybe I'll start, Regina. I think APAC really offers a very, very diverse market, culturally very different. You have multiple languages, which requires local market presence, but also the digital maturity of every country is very, very different. We see very highly advanced and mature markets. We see the upcoming highly growth-related emerging economies. And on the other side, we also see some of the regulated markets. What's really working for us is the ability to act local in these markets with a local presence. That is what the customers are looking for. And that's where we have a local sales, a local presales and a local delivery engine. But we're also bringing the power of SoftwareOne, right, in more a regional or a global sense. And that's where our operations, marketing and the regional delivery centers we have are really helping us service customers in the way they really want. And specifically for APAC now, we have 3 delivery centers, one which -- a couple of them which really focus on the English language, while we also have one which services all the different languages like Japanese and Korea and in Chinese, right? And that is really helping us serve these markets in the way we really wanted to support them.

Thank you. Regina?

So we're lucky that we have really one language, but in Quebec, they do speak French. So I have to admit that. But in North America specifically, it is the most advanced and fast-moving market for us today. And it's a race for AI. And I talked a little bit about our IT asset management capabilities. And one of the things that we've learned this year is it is resonating. If you walk into any boardroom in North America and simply ask the question, how much have you spent in AI in the last 12 months and then follow up the question with what's the ROI on that? You will not get a straight answer from anyone. And so we can truly leverage that with our IT portfolio management services. And that is a core strength for us. As a matter of fact, this year, I'm incredibly proud of our service delivery team who have delivered CHF 209 million, that's USD 269 million, USD 0.25 billion, back into the P&Ls of our customers so that they can reinvest that money in innovation. That's huge. I don't know anyone else in the North American market that's tracking it the way that we do, delivering, executing and being accountable to that. The mid-market needs that help because they're grossly under-resourced, and they need to compete in the market. I can leverage the channel and the channel partnerships to help us drive that mid-market space and that SMB. We proved it in Q1, and we're going to continue. We still have work to do. We have a lot of work to do in North America. But while others sell AI hope and hype, we're going to sell AI economics and tokenomics in FinOps.

Impressive. Thank you very much, and you see the confidence for future growth in North America. Let me summarize, right, and we go to the last question and maybe keep it short and crisp in one sentence. I mean, how would you describe your region from a growth perspective?

Okay. So -- and I really believe in this, Raffi. APAC is a market limited by our imagination, where we have unlimited growth potential, driven by innovation in the market, modernization. We are seeing cost pressures for the customers. And all of this, we believe that SoftwareOne is uniquely positioned to win trust and deliver value to our customers and partners.

North America is a high-growth, innovation-driven market where SoftwareOne and our partners execute and deliver with excellence around IT portfolio management and the channel.

Yes. Last but not least, DACH. I would say it's a highly penetrated market in which SoftwareOne is leveraging its strong marketplace position and its diverse service portfolio to increase value per customer.

Thank you very much. Thanks to all of you. Thank you, Varun, Regina, for flying in all the way from Asia and North America to join us here. Yes. And I think -- thanks for sharing all the insights as well to everyone. I think this shows the growth potential, which we basically see. We mentioned it. We see across all the regions, basically broad-based growth looking into 2030. Some will be faster, some less, but overall broad-based growth. And I think it gives us confidence that we can deliver the ambition, which we defined. So thank you for that.

And I think with that, I hand over to Schraner or Melissa or both of you or... [Presentation]

All right. I have the privilege and honor to bring on Nicole Dezen, who I will have her introduce herself, but she's the Corporate Vice President, leading the overall partner ecosystem within Microsoft. As you know, Microsoft is our largest provider vendor that we work with. We started our business with Microsoft, and we have a deep trust with them. But I know many of you are eager to hear this session. And so I would like to invite Nicole to have a discussion with me and be able to help answer some of the questions that you have all asked us over the last few years. So first of all, thank you, Nicole. It's really a pleasure for you to be here. For context, Nicole is based in Seattle. She flew in just for us to be here with you. So it's a huge time commitment, and I just wanted to say thank you for that.

Well, thanks for having me. It's such an honor to be here.

Honor is ours. And maybe just briefly, before we jump into questions, give a bit of your role background for this audience here today.

Sure. So I'm -- actually, I think today -- yesterday, I celebrated my 19th year at Microsoft. And 18 of my 19 years have been in our partner business. And Microsoft's heritage is the partner ecosystem. We actually turned 51 years old in April. Partner is in our DNA. Satya, our CEO, has very publicly said, we will always be a partner-led company. And it's never more applicable than right now with all of the new innovation, AI capability. And so I'm so grateful to be able to spend so much time with the team at SoftwareOne and see all of the incredible things you all are doing on behalf of our shared customers.

Thank you. Well, it's -- the trust goes both ways.

So let's get into it. I mean I know that there's a big underlying question. I'm going to get the elephant out of the room.

Please, yes.

So let's jump into it. So Microsoft clearly has been moving more direct in the enterprise space. So I think a question top of mind that many of the people in the room have is why are partners so essential? So what's -- when you think about that, what's your partner strategy overall? And particularly in this fast-moving pace with increased complexity, which has been the theme today, an AI-driven environment, where do you see partners specifically?

Sure. Well, as I said, Microsoft has always been a partner-led company, but you hit on it. It's so complex. What AI has brought to the world is so incredibly exciting and extraordinarily technical and a little bit terrifying to customers. And so this is where partners are so crucial to the equation. Microsoft's strategy is that we have a platform approach. And so we invest extremely heavily in R&D and AI innovation so that partners like SoftwareOne can invest in IP services and your unique differentiation on top with the goal that 1 plus 1 equals 10 in front of a customer. And what partners do is you really bring our tech to life. You translate all of the technology and the tools into business outcomes. The other thing, I think, came through really wonderfully in the regional discussion we just listened to, was the way that partners extend Microsoft's capability, you scale it in every industry, every geography and every customer segment. And so you are absolutely an extension of Microsoft, and you play a critical role that we will never play ourselves.

Thank you for that. I mean, thank you also for the investment. I think what often is underestimated is how much you've been leading in with us. So if we look at our AI transformation, back in 2019, we were AI Partner of the Year for Microsoft globally. But that was not done on our own. It was done through the investment that you helped us prepare for this AI era that we are in today. So when we talk about SMB, this has been a big growth driver for our future. We just announced our 2030 guiding, and channel, channel, channel is a big topic that we keep talking about. And you heard that in the regional session as well. You've identified this SMB segment as an important growth opportunity. How do you define SMB today? And why is this customer segment so crucial for Microsoft's future growth? And where do you see partners like us contributing and helping to reach this jointly together?

Yes. SMB is a topic I'm particularly passionate about. So I was so excited to hear the references so many times throughout the day-to-day. I'll start with numbers. IDC forecast that in Microsoft fiscal '27, which starts in 3 weeks, by the way, the TAM for SMB is $625 billion. It's a massive TAM. And candidly, we don't yet have our fair share. And so our job together is to find the way to serve the unique needs of those customers. And this is one of the things that's so special about our partnership is that you have the capability through your distribution business to uniquely serve those SMB customers, but you bring all of the capability that you've invested in centrally for so many years to bear. And so I think it's a fantastic combination. Distribution is core to Microsoft's strategy to serve small and medium businesses. And what you'll see us do in fiscal '27 is increased investment to enable distributors, particularly one that's so unique like SoftwareOne to be able to serve the needs of SMB. One of the things I'm particularly excited about right now is I think that AI is the great democratizer for small and medium businesses. These are -- historically, technology was designed to serve large enterprises, which you do quite well. But SMBs have a massive business opportunity now with AI and agentic, they can't do it without a partner. And so they're counting on partners like you to be able to package up the capability, give them confidence in what they're doing is secure, reliable, scalable, and that's really the capability that you're bringing to the market. I'm quite excited about it.

Thank you. And we're excited as well. I mean, if you think about our revenue growth and our margin profile, we fully believe that we need to scale out this because I always say it's about economies of scale. So it's the reach, it's the presence that we've overall said. When you talk about the importance of frontier firms, so that's the big, let's say, new thing. Satya just came out of Build talking all about frontier. What makes SoftwareOne a frontier firm? And where do you see us creating the most value for Microsoft and our customers?

Yes. Maybe I'll just start with how I think about what a frontier firm is. A frontier firm is an organization that makes AI real across the board inside the organization. It's not about a model or a tool or an agent here and there. It's truly rethinking the end-to-end business operation through the lens of AI. It's not about tech for tech's sake. It's about taking the business outcomes and then applying this amazing innovation that's -- it feels like there's something new every day coming, but it's about using the innovation to address your business outcomes more quickly, more effectively. There are several things that I look at when I think about a partner that's truly a frontier firm. And SoftwareOne is the example I often turn to publicly. The first and most important thing that we look at is a partner that is what we call customer zero. That's an organization that is using the technology internally first. And you know this well, Melissa. Microsoft has had a practice of using our own technology internally first for many years. And what that's done for us is it's allowed us, one, to just road test the tech and make sure that it's ready for prime time and ready for the scale of the businesses that we serve together. It also gives sellers, our engineering teams and our delivery people real-world credibility. And so one of the things I'm so pleased about when I look at what SoftwareOne has done is you've really embraced the belief behind why Customer Zero matters, integrated technology internally in order to give the entire SoftwareOne organization that expertise, that credibility and that insight. And then you take all of that and you bring it to customers. And this is where you can operationalize end-to-end workflows, use your own experiences. And for those that aren't aware, we train our own sellers and our customers to ask partners how they're using Microsoft technology internally. And the reason that we do that is because customers need to know that they can trust a partner with this very, very precious transformation goal that they have.

I love it. And you're right. I mean, Microsoft has had this long history of testing the products internally. I mean, you look at Teams, when I was at Microsoft, we were testing Teams before it was even actually rolled out and then COVID came. And wow, the world was then better prepared to have a digital infrastructure in place to communicate during a time like that. We adopted that in SoftwareOne, and it's actually been crucial to our sales capability so that we have the internal ability to sell to our customers and show that we are that customer. Now the big one I have to go to because this is the investor community. So they look at incentives, how you pay, and there's always these questions of are incentives going to change again like they did with the EA incentive. And I keep reaffirming, no, no, no, CSP is here to stay. And I think you can rightfully say that CSP is, yes, here to stay.

CSP is here to stay. CSP is our hero motion for SMB and the mid-market. I'm giving you a preview to our fiscal '27. So I can confirm. I'm wearing my money jacket today. So I agree.

Because as you build out your partner model and incentives, we always say it's a shift, it's an evolution, it's helping to build that capability for the future so that we're in a position to deliver together and co-sell together. What do you think the kind of underlying objective? And how do we think of the role of partners in this kind of future? And I know you can't reveal anything yet because you haven't -- they're just rolling out this fiscal year for starting in July. But how do you evolve that more from a holistic perspective?

Sure. So one of the things I'm responsible for as the Chief Partner Officer is our partner incentive strategy, and it's a material investment that we make. It's one of many investments we make in the partner ecosystem. We make all of our investments through the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner program or you'll hear us talk about MAICPP. This is the holistic capability that we -- where we enable partners with benefits, skilling the badges, your designations and specializations, which SoftwareOne has quite accomplished that, by the way, go-to-market, co-sell, and of course, incentives. And I know everyone, particularly this community gets quite excited about incentives. Our objective every year as we look at how we put incentives to work for the business is to motivate and reward partners to generate growth. And that's what everyone will continue to see in our fiscal '27. The incentives are designed to ensure that we're working effectively together at the face of a customer to enable you as the partner to be focused on growth and growth looks like many things. Growth can be new customer acquisition, it can be upsell, it can be cross-sell, it can be attached, like we're here to ensure with our ever-growing portfolio that you've got all of the tools at your disposal to serve those customer outcomes. I look at partner incentives as the moral equivalent to our seller incentive compensation. And in our planning processes that we do every year, I sit with our incentive compensation team internally, and we look together at what are the levers we're going to use to motivate Microsoft's own sales force and then what are the levers we're going to use to motivate partners. In our fiscal '26, which has 3 weeks left to go, we had a record level of investment. I'll be able to say the same thing again in fiscal '27.

Thank you. And thank you for the continued investment. It's so important that this community hears it because I know we went through a big shift in 2025 with the enterprise business. But I think it's fair to say we had a partnership approach going through. And the investments, as we always said, there was actually -- there wasn't a decrease overall. There was an opportunity to actually earn more, but that shift went from -- to CSP and to our services business overall. And I think we're certainly benefiting from that as we look to 2026 and beyond.

I also just want to thank you and the entire team at SoftwareOne. That is the hallmark of real partnership. We were making changes in our business that we felt were right for the long term for customers and for partners, but it did mean a shift for you. And looking at the way that SoftwareOne pivoted, you still have phenomenal licensing and transaction capability because that brings the cash register and that's important for everybody. But the investments that you made in order to really be able to shine through advisory capability, services and delivery capability, that's magical. And that is the kind of growth that we are rewarding and investing in, in partners like SoftwareOne.

Thank you.

Yes.

And you're right. I mean, the transactional business is still here, and it's still important. And we still have to deliver it to customers, to enterprise customers, to public sector. We still have to deliver there. It's extremely important, and that's a big portion of overall business as well as what we call indirect markets, so emerging markets. Let's kind of maybe shift to my last final question for you. Looking ahead, we're talking all about AI, clearly, Microsoft, you are talking about AI, as it accelerates, how do you see the role of partners such as SoftwareOne evolving?

The role of SoftwareOne and other partners only becomes more critical in the equation. I heard references to some of our new products. I know you and I are quite excited about Agent 365 as an example. Microsoft is releasing new product, it does feel like every day. I know we announced quite a few products at Build recently. You are the face of Microsoft to customers. And so you are the ones that take all the amazing tech that we're building and you make it real for customers. You are the ones that sit with a customer to understand their business goals, whether it's about enhancing their own employee experiences, reimagining customer engagement, reshaping business processes. It's a partner like SoftwareOne that internalizes that and then decides what are all of the capabilities that you package up in a very complex world that's moving very fast and also understanding that all of that has to be done securely. Security, governance, this is nonnegotiable. Like you can't have AI without security anymore. And so when I look at SoftwareOne, I look at the investments that you've made in your centers of excellence, in cyber, in delivery, you are world-class. And so this is why customers continue to bet their businesses with you. This is why customers trust you.

Thank you. Thank you, Nicole. It's really -- I mean, an honor to have you here to fly all the way to take the time, I think, to demystify some of these questions that our investors don't get the chance to meet with you every day. So I really want to say thank you on behalf of everyone here and for everybody online. Thank you.

Thanks, everyone.

So with that, now we're going to take a deeper dive in terms of our overall financial aspirations and midterm guidance. So my pleasure to bring Hanspeter, our CFO, on to take us through that.

So good afternoon, everyone. Let me also extend a warm welcome from my side. It's great to see such a strong interest in our story. I'm Hanspeter Schraner, Chief Financial Officer, and it's a privilege to walk you through our financial ambitions for 2030. Over the next 20 minutes, I want to give you a clear and compelling picture where we are heading financially and importantly, why we are confident in our ability to get there. We have spent the last year delivering on the most significant integration in our industry, bringing Crayon and SoftwareONE together. That work is now largely behind us and what has emerged is a stronger, more diversified and more scalable business. Today, I will talk you through 3 things: First, the foundation we have built; second, our specific financial ambitions for 2030; and third, how we intend to allocate the capital along the way. So let's start with our foundation. Our combined business, SoftwareONE and Crayon has created a truly strong financial foundation built on 3 pillars. First, successful integration, successful execution of the Crayon integration, supported by strong underlying business momentum. We have already delivered CHF 86 million in synergies, and we are ahead of plan to reach our CHF 100 million target. Beyond cost synergies, we have established a robust financial backbone with unified data and reporting across the combined entity. This is not just about efficiency. It provides us a single source of truth to manage our business with greater discipline, transparency and speed. Second, a relentless focus on value creation. Our strategy is around -- is centered around profitable growth. We are disciplined on cost, focused on operating leverage and driving strong cash conversion. At the same time, we are seeing a clear improvement in earnings quality with less noise, fewer adjustments and more predictable, transparent financials. Third, a clear commitment to delivering attractive shareholder returns. This is reflected in a balanced and disciplined capital allocation approach, investing in growth, returning capital through dividends and maintaining a strong balance sheet. This discipline preserves the financial flexibility to act on value-accretive opportunities as they arise. So the foundation is solid. The integration is delivering and the business is built on real momentum. This slide is at the heart of what I want to leave you with today, our 4 headline ambitions for 2030. Number one, high single-digit revenue CAGR from '26 to 2030. We are positioned directly in the path of structural growth across IT cost management, software and cloud sourcing, cloud services and data and AI solutions. We do not need to create new markets. We need to execute in markets that are already expanding rapidly around us with AI acting as an additional accelerator. Number two, an EBITDA margin above 28%. This represents an improvement of around 5 percentage points compared to our 2026 baseline, driven by structural factors, operating leverage, automation and AI-enabled efficiency rather than one-off measures. And number three, the cash conversion above 60%. This is about constantly turning profit into cash, reliably and repeatedly at a level that supports our growth ambitions while maintaining balance sheet discipline. These targets are firmly grounded in the structural strength of our business and the progress we are already delivering. Further, we confirm our commitment to our dividend policy with a target of 30% to 50% of net profit. Let me now unpack our revenue ambition. On the left, you see our 2025 starting point on a like-for-like basis, 1.4% growth, assuming Crayon has been consolidated from the beginning of 2024. In 2026, we expect mid- to high single-digit growth. And looking at 2030, we deliver high single-digit CAGR across the period. So where does this growth come from? Let me start with Software & Cloud Direct. We continue to scale within the Microsoft ecosystem, driven by the ongoing transition from AI to CSD. At the same time, we are expanding across other hyperscalers and independent software vendors while increasing our presence in underpenetrated markets. Software and Cloud Channel is, as Gumi explained, a highly scalable global growth engine with significant uptake from a relatively low base. Growth is driven by the expansion of the Microsoft Tier 2 model into new geographies as well as increasing scale across other hyperscalers in underpenetrated regions. Additional upside comes from expanding ISV distribution rights, enabling us to capture incremental revenue and internalized margins as well as from service-led cross-sell where channel partnerships unlock access to SMB customers and drive incremental demand through bundled offerings. Overall, this creates a diversified, scalable and structurally supported growth runway for the Channel business. Software and Cloud Services remains a core growth pillar, increasingly driven by AI-led services in data, AI and IT cost management. Growth is supported by strong underlying momentum in cloud services with all service lines benefiting from rising infrastructure demand and increasing focus on data and AI. Cloud services and ITAM are becoming key attach points for AI-driven workloads and more complex enterprise environments. At the same time, the portfolio is actively reshaped, reducing nonstrategic, lower-margin offerings while focusing investments on higher growth, higher-value areas. Data AI is the primary growth driver, complemented by IT cost management, where a-driven cost optimization and governance capabilities further strengthen the value proposition. Overall, this results in a more focused, higher growth service portfolio with AI acting as the key accelerator of both revenue growth and strategic relevance. Now let's talk about profitability. Our 2025 adjusted EBITDA margin on a like-for-like basis was 20.9%. We expect to be above 23% in '26 and our 2030 target is above 28%, implying roughly 5 percentage points of expansion over 5 years. Let me explain the dynamics behind this. There are 2 structural forces shaping margin trajectory. First, our business mix involves. Direct channel is structurally higher margin than services, and our delivery margin is already at industry benchmarks across all 3 business lines. AI-enabled solutions and delivery support us in maintaining this benchmark contribution margins even in a more competitive environment going forward. As the share of services increase, it creates a natural mix-driven dilution at EBITDA level. However, this dilution is more than offset. The key driver is AI-enabled efficiency. We are embedding AI and automation across both delivery and SG&A from service execution and support to sales operations and back-office functions. While delivery margins are highly optimized, AI further supports margin resilience and targeted improvements within the Service business, ongoing portfolio sharpening and the focus on higher value areas such as Data & AI and IT Cost Management structurally enhance profitability. At the same time, -- the primary impact is further down the P&L through structurally lower sales cost and administrative costs, resulting in a leaner operating model and tangible cost savings. Combined with operating leverage as the business scales, this drives sustained EBITDA margin expansion despite the increasing share of services in the mix while also improving earnings quality to reduce reliance on adjustments and nonrecurring items. Cash conversion. I know this is a metric many of you follow very closely. Our target is above 50%, defined as free cash flow over EBITDA. Let me walk you through the drivers. On the operating cash flow side, we are seeing a step change driven by 2 factors. First, the EBITDA growth as just described; and second, a structural release of net working capital over the next 3 years. Integration of Crayon and the internal use of AI allow us to reduce time to invoice, improve credit and rebuild as well as harmonize customer with vendor payment terms, supported by a strong cash collection. Together, this unlocks cash that has historically been tied up in the balance sheet. On the CapEx side, our bigger than CHF 150 million incremental investment over the next 3 years in growth, technology and AI enablement is self-funded through that working capital release. We are not asking you to accept a period of heavy capital expenditure with promise of future returns. The incremental investments we are making are funded from within the business. Taken together, this creates a structural step change in cash generation. The combination of EBITDA expansion from 29% above 28% and the net working capital reset drives a sustained improvement in free cash flow conversion in the near term and through 2030. This means we are not just growing profitably, but we are converting the profit into cash at scale. And this gives us flexibility to reinvest in the business, to return capital to our shareholders and to act on value-accretive opportunities. With this, we change to the capital allocation. Our capital allocation policy is built on 3 principles, and they are deliberately balanced. First, investing in sustainable growth. We prioritize focused investments in organic growth initiatives, strategic AI to drive both revenue and efficiency and selective value-accretive bolt-on M&A. We are not pursuing transformational deals. Our focus is on targeted acquisitions that either strengthen capabilities or accelerate our position in high-growth segments. Second, a progressive dividend policy. We are committed to return 30% to 50% of net profit to shareholders. Progressive means growth as earnings increase, the dividend increases. This also reflects our confidence in the sustainability and quality of our cash flows. And third, a disciplined leverage. We maintain a healthy net debt-to-EBITDA ratio, a strong balance sheet provides resilience and importantly, the flexibility to act when attractive opportunities arise. We are investing in growth while delivering returns and maintaining financial discipline. What you are looking at is a business with 4 clearly defined and mutually enforced financial characteristics. Sustainable revenue growth, broad-based, structure supported and accelerated by AI across all business lines. Structural margin expansion, driven by AI-enabled efficiency and operating leverage more than offsetting mix effects. Improved cash generation driven by EBITDA growth and anchored in a structural net working capital reset, converting profit into cash at scale and rising earnings quality as integration effects fade and adjustments decline, reported results increasingly reflect the true underlying business performance. These 4 elements reinforce each other. Better growth drives better margins, better margins drive stronger cash generation and stronger cash generation fuels further growth while enabling us to return capital to our shareholders. This is a business with momentum, built on a stronger foundation with clear visibility on how we deliver our targets. And we have the strategy, we have the discipline and we have the team to execute. Thank you for your attention. I hope I have given you a clear sense of both our ambition and our confidence in delivering on these targets. I look forward to your questions and to updating you on our progress on the quarters ahead. Thank you.

Thank you Hanspeter. We will follow the same procedure as in the previous Q&A session. So we will start with taking the audience -- questions from the audience. So if you have a question, please raise your hand and we will provide you with a microsoft. Sorry, microphone.

Yes sir. Thank you forum for the presentation. Just 2 clarifications. You're not breaking out the margin targets for the 3 pillars? You only have an overall margin target?

That's correct. We have an overall margin target above 28%, but there are no targets for the 3 business lines.

And the same question. Sorry.

The report on the margin quarter-by-quarter or half year and the end of the year in our segment reporting.

And the goals include M&A?

Goal does not include M&A.

It don't include M&A?

It does not include -- it's organic.

Okay. So what's the role of M&A?

We certainly believe M&A will help us drive inorganic growth, but we don't plan and model that way. So this -- you could say our guiding expectations are delivered based on organic growth. So the growth drivers that we see in the business for the bridge that Hanspeter walked through. We -- I think M&A from our perspective is certainly something that could be accretive in the future. Right now, our focus is to continue closing out the integration of Crayon, which we're very pleased with the current progress. And then we'll continue to pursue efforts. Certainly, North America is a geography that naturally makes sense given the scale and the opportunity that Regina discussed already. And of course, also augmenting skills and capabilities, especially on the technical service side overall. But at the moment, our focus is to make sure we drive organic growth.

And a question -- a follow-up question, if I may. So I mean, you said you're not really trying to buy at this point or making many M&As at this point. But what about the prices in North America? Aren't they very high? I mean would they have to fall in order for you to be interested in buying companies?

Not necessarily. I think it depends on the strategic asset and capability. Yes, you're right that typically pricing is much higher in North America in terms of valuation overall. However, we could do bolt-on acquisitions, carve-outs and some of those types. But at the moment, I think let's make sure that we deliver on what we say. So that's crucial. We have 2026 guiding. Our focus is delivering on that, executing the business. We see so much growth potential in our existing portfolio and continue to hire organically is certainly a focus, but we will always consider M&A opportunities in the future.

I'm Reasol,Berenberg. I'm interested in the net working capital release. So how should we read it? And could you also comment on the factoring levels going forward? And also what a potential decrease in factoring levels might mean for your EBITDA margin as apparently there is going to be an IFRS rule changed from next year onwards?

Okay. These are 3 questions. Let me start with the factoring. And as I stated many times, we see factoring as flexible financing instrument, which is tailored for the specific purpose. We use it. Today and currently, it's cheaper than bank financing. So -- and this does not change going forward. Regarding the capital conversion target, it's assumed that factoring is -- has no impact. So with other words, in the model, it's assumed that factoring stay constant. If we would increase or decrease factoring, of course, we would adjust for that to calculate the cash conversion, keep it neutral. The last question was related to the introduction of IFRS 18, I guess. We are currently analyzing the impact of our industry. As you rightfully said, it will have an impact in the disclosure. We are analyzing that also comparing what our peers are doing. And as soon as we have clarity, we will tell you what the impact of these targets are. These are targets under the current IFRS regime. and not under the 2027 regime.

One quick one on the geographics. I mean one might think that the maturity of different markets are kind of different. Which of those markets would you need to invest more to make sure that you are going to accelerate your growth or basically retain your market share in a sense? And which would you see more competition and more critical for your growth?

I mean as you mentioned or as we mentioned before, it's -- we have a very diverse region, right? And -- if you look into some of our more mature regions, I would say, like the DACH region, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, kind of the homegrown region from software on since day 1. You can also take the Nordics, right, which is like the home of Crayon, where we have a very, I would say, high saturation also a lot of customers, which we are already serve. I think there it's more about investing into cross and upsell potential and therefore, probably in presales and dedicated delivery capabilities in order to really increase that wallet share. I think that's probably more for some of the more mature markets. And then we have territories like APAC, which is really a mix, right, some mature markets like ANZ, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, but then also some very emerging markets and also some markets where we have relatively little market share still in the mix. So it depends really there country specific on where you invest more and where you focus more on, let's say, increasing the wallet share. It really depends a bit country by country from this perspective.

And is there anything like remaining in North America to ensure that turnaround has actually happened? That's what we saw in Q1, and we're going to have like a sustainable growth going forward?

I mean, in general, we are confident in North America for growth for the full year 2026. I think given the leadership which we have in place, the team which we have in place, we have a clear direction. I think Regina introduced some of her ambitions to us before. And I believe also in the opportunity, I mean, North America is a massive market, right? It's the biggest market by far globally. We still have relatively little market share, which gives us a huge opportunity to grow, right? We have a very good business model around our Channel business, around our IT Cost Management solutions there. And I think with focus and doubling down on these areas, we see long term, a very good growth opportunity for us in North America.

I have one question regarding your -- the new financial numbers that you have given us for 2030. I was wondering a bit that you look so far out given the fact that the environment is so dynamic and also the 5 percentage points of margin expansion looks like a lot on the first view. Now you also call it ambitions. You don't call it targets or guidance. Can you qualify that a bit? Should I put these numbers in my model as a midpoint? Or is this really like an ambitious target that you strive to achieve with your crew and the sales team? Or is it more like the bar and you're actually aiming for more than that in 5 years down the road?

You should put the numbers in your model.

It's midterm guiding.

So that's the midpoint.

Assuming you achieve your targets in 2030. Based on today's share price, you would trade at like 5x cash flow at a 20% yield. So my question is, why wouldn't you allocate any cash on buybacks?

I mean, look, it's a fair and a good question actually. We have this capital allocation framework, we present it. Of course, I mean, this does not -- this is our priority. And this is where we see the priorities, but this is not a complete no to buyback. So as the gentleman said, it's a 5-year period. We have our priorities mentioned in the framework, but I mean it's not an absolute no to share buybacks. But for the time being, it's what we present.

And I got another question on monitoring the token usage of the different LLM providers. Is this a capability that you have today fully? And do you have it just for Anthropic because of the partnership? Or is it something you're still building out?

So we have the token capability across the LLMs today. So everything from Copilot to Gemini to Anthropic. This is something that we will continue to build that IP component and service our customers, and you'll continue to hear more from us on this.

Yes. I think my question was already asked to touch on, but maybe just to drive the point home for other shareholders that have the same view. As we sit here today, I mean, you've laid out these very attractive targets that you -- based on the regional leaders have a very high degree of confidence in delivering. And we're sitting here at a valuation that's really a substantial discount that there's not too many of the capital-light type of peers. Maybe there's Softcat and Byte and then you look at where you guys bought rhipe, where -- obviously, there's a lot of synergies but whorfMyst transacted at, where Softchoice has transacted at. And I think there's maybe some confusion as to why we should have such high degree of confidence in these guidance numbers if we're not confident enough to buy back our own shares, why should we have confidence in those numbers if we're not putting that capital then just buying back our own stock.

I think it's a good feedback. So first and foremost, I mean, when we look at the growth potential, we also have to invest in growth. So we want to invest in profitable growth, and that's the focus. I think building on your answer in terms of country scale up, if you look at North America, I mean, you've come from the U.S., you know the potential. It's significant. And so if you look at just 5% of our employee base today is there, I mean, we need to continuously build up. So I think driving the skills and capability and talent profile is essential. Yes, share buybacks is certainly a consideration, and we will continue to evaluate that as part of our overall capital allocation framework.

Any further questions from the audience?

What about online?

There is another one.

I have still a question regarding the shareholder structure you have. Do you know there is still a main part of shareholder with one. Do you know in the future, are they going to sell more shares? Because recently, when one of them, I think Mr. Curti, he sold quite a big part of shares and then the share price went down. Do you know that if it stabilized at the moment or have you to expect further of this huge share sales? And another question -- second point, I would like to ask once again regarding America, where you're so optimistic. What about the competitive? I never heard about this because I know that in the States, there is a tough fierce competition there. You have taken this in consideration with your growth ambitions?

Maybe I can start with the competitive situation in North America. I mean you are right, there are big players out there, much larger than us in North America. However, I think we also have to consider in terms of the IT Cost Management, IT Asset Management business. We are the market leader in North America. So we have a very good positioning there. In terms of our Channel business, I think we see very strong growth rates in North America. And considering the size of the business which we have, if this continues, actually, we are quite positive that we can achieve solid growth rates midterm and long term, irrespective of somewhat the competition. And the second point is, I mean, we have competition everywhere, not only in North America, in all the local markets.

I can take. Okay. The second question, I guess, was the sale of the shares of Mr. Curi. So at the end of the day, this has nothing to do. I mean, first is not an insider. So he had no knowledge about Q1 numbers. And there was a private decision at the end. Based on this -- it was nothing to do with SoftwareONE at all. And we do not expect something similar. But we have absolutely no indication that this will happen in the near future again. And there was a third question, I guess. Okay.

Okay. Any further questions from the audience in the room here in Zurich? Then I would -- sorry.

Just a quick one. It's Andreas again. So could you maybe comment on the role of partners in general as more demand is moving towards AI and tokens. Do you see a bigger place in between the software vendors and clients as you have it in the Microsoft space in software nowadays?

Thank you for that question. I absolutely do. I see so much more potential even bigger than before. And the reason for that is that the AI journey and just that journey of us as a company, all of those steps have to be in place for a customer to realize the benefits of AI. so much, let's say, on-premise business still exists to really harness AI really need cloud. Having your data state and order needs to be in place. How do you prioritize which scenarios because there's only so much budget that a company can deploy. So really getting that maximum return takes prioritization and focus. That's where we come in. So we have the full service capability to deploy and to prepare a company. We can advise on the LLM space, and then we can also manage that full cost. So when you look at that life cycle, we touch all of those points. So for us, we believe that this actually increases the opportunity, hence, the implied midterm guiding. And we see that partners such as ourselves need to lean in and support our customers because it's increasing in complexity with choice. which option do you choose? How do you go pass it? Nicole said it so well herself. I mean the Microsoft portfolio continues to just expand and expand. And so it's quite confusing for customers, and that's where we play a very distinct role to advise and to grow that portfolio.

Okay. It seems like we have no further questions from the audience in the room, but I would like the operator to open up for online questions.

We have a question from the line of Christopher Tom from UBS.

I guess just one question on headcount. How do you expect this to sort of develop given some of the AI efficiencies? Do you think it's going to increase or sort of stay flat? And what part does it help with the margin expansion?

Look, we -- I mean, first of all, it's not a DIA introduction. Let me start. First, we are a company having capabilities to do it by our own. That's a big benefit. So we will internally introduce AI as we evolve. It's not -- it will not happen overnight. And of course, it will have an impact on the FTE number. But it's not a kind of, let's say, restructuring case or big layoffs. It's a gradual involvement through 2030. And the big thing is we have internally the capability, the expertise and knowledge to do it. And we already do it actually. So I guess it will have an impact on FTEs, but it will not be like a layoff of, I don't know, a number of people. It will gradually involve, if that answers.

I think. Certainly, I think when we talk about growth and driving it, we're going to continue to invest in sales capability, invest in our people skills and development as well as presales and service delivery. We need to continue to broaden out our skills. So it's not that AI is going to replace headcount. I think that's extremely important. We shift the tasks and the focus of our employees to get greater efficiency out of their time. So it's -- if you look back, people used to have to operate an elevator. Those jobs don't exist because they've been shifted. And so that's how I think about it in the sense that AI helps us do our work better. I mean I use it on a day-to-day basis to help me be far more efficient in how I build my PowerPoint slides to content development. And in the past, I would have to go and try to leverage others for that. So I think that's just what's been saying, using our brains. I think humanity in the end needs to win in this whole AI race. But we have to be able to, let's say, be more efficient in scale. And so that's certainly something, I think, from a headcount perspective, we'll continue to invest in people. That does not necessarily go away.

Okay. Then I think we are on time actually, and we will conclude the program for today. Thank you so much on behalf of the whole EB team and the SoftwareOne team. Thank you also to the guest speakers of today from Visma, Apro and Microsoft. We will now serve an outside of the room. And as always, if you have any follow-up questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to the IR team. Thank you.