Our Strategy

We are a software company, and with that as our guide it defines how we execute in the market both internally and externally. By selling software we can continue to focus on driving ARR growth with higher gross margins, increasing shareholder value, and building upon our high customer retention rates across the business. To do this, we will further add simple packages of features that solve specific pain points in the industry today and shift to a more “land and expand” approach. This helps shorten our sales cycles and ultimately will drive the new logo goals we have for the business in the coming years as we continue to innovate and address some of the most challenging issues facing the digital industry today in marketing and fraud.

We needed to focus more on the expansion of customers as they start using Celebrus to solve for the initial pain point. To do that, we launched a Customer Success function to drive year-on-year growth from our existing customers, thereby freeing up the time of our Sales team to focus on winning new logos. Their impact has already been very apparent as they are engaging with customers even before the initial project is completed to be able to develop the customer relationship and seek quick upsell wins once the customer is seeing value.

We have also continued to evolve how we position the platform and align the sales team around the globe. From a positioning perspective, we continue to simplify our messaging and focus on providing the Celebrus Platform to our customers with various applications tied to core use cases and pain points. In the latter half of the year, we also specialized our new business team by vertical with a focus on Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare (US), Retail, and Travel and Hospitality.

We continue to fine tune our approach as we learn more from selling directly in the field. We are also continuing to evolve our selling alongside our partners. Every investment and approach is being measured, and we are using AI to help us better understand how we can improve the sales process to continue to move deals more quickly and smoothly through the pipeline. A key value in our team is to be easy to buy from, so we continue to focus on that as well.

Heading into FY24, we made it clear that our approach was cloud-first, which paved the way for our Celebrus Cloud offering. It is underpinned by our Managed Services division that, over the years, has built some of the most powerful and innovative analytic environments. Celebrus Cloud provides our customers with options to help them quickly get value from our Celebrus software in a single-tenant, private cloud managed service and is the foundation of core feature releases in the Celebrus app platform, including Celebrus Digital Analytics which was launched during the year. It also makes the upgrade process easier for customers allowing them more immediate access to new features as they are released in new versions.

We continued to incentivize our product and engineering teams to find opportunities to identify and protect Intellectual Property and continued to invest in key research projects that are driven by where we see the market going and the challenges that we see on the horizon. We launched versions 9.8 and 9.9 of our Celebrus software which continues our commitment of launching two main releases each year for our customers driven by industry gaps and customer/partner requests. A key element during the year was the launch of Celebrus Digital Analytics which provides organizations with access to a true, first-party visualization platform for digital data with full data control in the hands of the brands. It removes the need to rely on third-party platforms that use a shared environment and funnel data through outside environments, thereby posing regulatory risks.

We intend to continue to improve Celebrus Cloud through increased automation of its functionality, while also encouraging existing customers to move from on-premise solutions to Celebrus Cloud for the positive reasons outlined above. We will also undertake an exercise to audit our cloud costs to ensure optimal efficiency in the use of cloud resources, and we will continue to bring cloud-only features to the Celebrus Platform as an added benefit to those customers choosing to operate in that model.

Annual Recurring Revenue, driven by selling our Celebrus software and Celebrus Cloud managed service, is a core focus for the business to drive more value for our shareholders. Our goal, given the nature of our business, is to have ARR comprise an increasing percentage of our revenues each year.

During the year we had key wins including a leading European retailer of experience gifts using Celebrus Cloud, to help drive better engagement with customers, build compliant marketing profiles about those customers, and ultimately deliver better customer experiences, and a US healthcare customer, which will leverage the Celebrus data model to create a digital patient data identity that is compliant with local regulations and allows for better experiences as patients navigate the digital platforms offered by this provider. We also added a new financial services customer, who will be solving for both Marketing and Fraud use cases in a Celebrus Cloud deployment.

These wins along with other new logo wins and customer upsells, drove ARR growth of 20.9%, and ARR revenue now accounts for 92% of all software revenues.

We will continue to grow our sales and customer success teams as well as encouraging customers to move to Celebrus Cloud. This will drive ARR growth. We will also continue to productize offerings that combine elements of Celebrus, such as Celebrus CDI for Salesforce or CXM Signals with Merkle, that simplify the Sales process.

The management team continues to identify areas of opportunity to build efficiencies in the business, notably through improved systems and redeployment of employees, that will allow us to apply key talent into higher value areas on the front lines. We also continue to identify Solution Integrator (SI) partners to provide bandwidth to assist our customers globally in their journey with Celebrus.

Following the implementation of various internal systems over the last two years we have moved into our next phase of reporting and analysis for line managers and the team in the field to ensure we are being data-driven in all aspects of our business. We are also looking at ways to further build efficiencies into how we deploy Celebrus Cloud and bring automation to life in how we simplify configuration of our platforms. We continued to revisit the structure of the business to ensure we are managing our operating expenses prudently whilst focusing more resources on customer-facing roles.

With the work over the last two years of investments into systems and the restructuring of departments now being largely complete we are focussed on headcount growth to drive revenue and ARR. We will do this from a solid foundation and that also enables us now to consider opportunities for growth by acquisition as well as organic growth. We will embark upon a proactive search for suitable acquisition targets. These will be centred around data activation and will be IP that we can plug right into the Celebrus Platform to add value to our customers.

We are continuing our journey of building a high-performance team rooted in accountability and a customer-first mentality with an eye to always looking for ways to improve upon how we operate on a daily basis. We firmly believe that software companies who get complacent ultimately end up losing in the end, so continuous improvement is critical for us. This will create opportunities for our staff around the globe for professional development that is mutually beneficial to our amazing team as well as our shareholders and our customers.

We continue to build on improved communication and innovation across the business. Our bi-monthly global Town Hall meetings have continued and we ran a global employee survey for the second time which showed improved employee satisfaction. We also moved offices in both India and the UK providing state-of-the-art and more engaging workspaces for our teams. We have also used the Customer Success team to start to build better ways to engage with our customers throughout the year.

We will continue to utilize our new HR systems and processes to ensure we are bringing in top talent to the business while also creating opportunities for growth internally. We will continue to evolve the culture to foster innovation, creativity, and productivity. ESG will also continue to play a key role in bringing our people together. We are also exploring several ways to incorporate AI into the way we service our people and our customers.