The other quarter is coming from the continued exposure to risk that our clients have in housing their own applications in the data environment. It’s quite shocking, the number of those incidents that have come about in the marketplace, not necessarily directly against our applications but in their IT data center, which gave them a lot of heartburn and so more and more of that is coming to the table now where clients are basically saying, we need to be out of this business. We need to have professional management, a more robust data center, better administration and stay up to date and that’s stimulating some of the demand as well.
Operator: Our next question comes from Anja Soderstrom.
Anja Soderstrom: Hi, thank you for taking my question and congratulations on the progress in the quarter. I’m just curious with you saying that the deals have been starting to lose up, but you say that larger deals are taking longer. How should we think about fiscal 2025 and beyond in terms of that? Could we expect revenue growth to accelerate helped by those larger deals coming through or…
Allan Dow: Yeah, it’s early in that phase now. It’s only February, but for fiscal ’25 for us starts in May and runs out for another 12 after that, but we’re anticipating the same thing, Anya. We’re seeing the budgets that are freeing up. We’re seeing that people are serious about it. Many clients are on a calendar year, so they are now just getting access to those budgets and kicking off the projects in anticipation of launching them and starting spending in calendar year 2024, which would predominantly fall into our fiscal year 2025. So we’re quite bullish about it. We think that the momentum is coming around as we anticipated for the spring and into the summer and are looking forward to a robust year, a very busy year ahead of us.
Anja Soderstrom: Okay, thank you. And in terms of the Gen AI, and you said that we’re kind of in the first phase there, going into the second out of four phases. Do you think that might be a roadblock in terms of the sales cycle? Your customer wants to wait and see how that pans out before they make any decisions?
Allan Dow: No, I don’t think so. So it’s such a novel and unique capability that people are clamoring for it. It’s a natural progression anyway. What we’re seeing in the marketplace is that with the excitement, there’s a little bit of fear and concern. One of the things we’ve done very successfully is to put a wrapper around it to give them assurance that our generative AI within our application is not going to be out surfing the World Wide Web and coming up with risky factors around that sort of thing or exposing their data in any way to the outside world. So we’ve given our clients confidence around that. Now they want to get started. They want to get a feel for what this means, build momentum and build credibility and trust, and then be willing to take the next step.
So the evolution of the technology and the ability for people to absorb it and really understand it and appreciate and build the trust is going in lockstep. So we don’t anticipate any delay in deals because of the evolution of this technology now.
Anja Soderstrom: Okay, thank you. And I’m sorry if you mentioned this, but you said you exhausted the authorized buyback program. Did you approve a new one or do you expect that to be approved or how are you thinking about buybacks going forward?
Allan Dow: We haven’t made any decision about what to do next. We just completed that right as the holidays were coming together and wrapped up the last one that had been approved for many years now. We had the availability to make that buyback happen. So we’ll take that up in the new fiscal year and consider all possibilities. As we said, we’re still sitting on a healthy balance sheet with cash available just short of $80 million and in the new year, new fiscal year, we’ll make some decisions about how best to deploy that.
Anja Soderstrom: Okay, and as a follow-up to that, what do you see in the main [ph] market now?
Allan Dow: Interesting market. It’s kind of mixed right now of what’s out there. There’s some interesting things we would take an eye to, but we don’t have any specific announcements around at this time. We’ve not exited that market. We’re still interested and we’re still engaged and when we find the right thing and get mutual agreement on that, we’ll make some announcements about that next move.
Operator: Our next question comes from Zach Cummins.
Zach Cummins: Alan, I was curious in terms of your go-to-market strategy with Garvis now rebranded as Demand AI, can you talk about just the progression of going through these initial pilots and it sounds like some of these are on the verge of committing to pretty substantial upsizes and longer-term contracts. So do you get a sense of the potential uplift you can see if you’re able to sign kind of a full longer-term contract with DemandAI with some of these new prospects?
Allan Dow: Yeah. So at the point of acquisition of Garvis, that team was very successfully building a book of clients and getting momentum and proof points with the product in the marketplace using the pilot strategy. Very effective from a startup standpoint. What we’re seeing is many of those pilots had already matured to the point where we are actively engaged in finalizing contracts for the long-term. Pretty substantial upside in those opportunities when we convert those to long-term because the pilots weren’t really built to manage the entire enterprise. They were maybe a product line or a few product lines or a segment, a division of the business or maybe a regional area or something of that nature. So the upside on it, Zach, as you said, is quite significant and coming about, we anticipate that we’ll have some of those transactions completed in our fourth quarter, more of them coming on the heels of that in the first quarter.
