Actual Experience PLC (LON:ACT) Chief Executive Officer Dave Page caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their channel partner update.
Q1: We’ve just seen your channel partner update, can you explain what’s behind this latest expansion of the Open Purchase Order?
A1: For a while now, this particular partner has been using an Open Purchase Order so that deployments that are done by that partner can be invoiced by us as those deployments progress.
So, they’ve just very significantly increased the size of the Open Purchase Order which gives us more capacity to draw down against than we’ve ever had before and really what sits behind that of course, is it’s been driven by demand. We announced a couple of large deployments last year and those two partners that deployed the two large customer deployments have somewhat been galvanised by the success of those deployments and are now putting resources behind our product in a way that hasn’t happened before.
This particular partner has its own dedicated resources to our product and an internal revenue target and really, it’s that internal revenue target that they need to meet themselves which has driven this increase in Open Purchase Order so we’re obviously very pleased with that.
Q2: Do you see this as a leading indicator of revenue?
A2: Yes, absolutely. There’s no doubt that there’s been an increase in activity at the partner, the internal forecast we talked about, the resources in order to meet that forecast, we can see it’s generating demand, it’s building pipeline. So, Actual Experience do take it as a leading indicator of revenue and actually, I’ve never been as positive about this business as we stand today.
Q3: You talk about two partners in your RNS, the PO relates to one of them, how is progress with your other partner?
A3: That’s also going very well. They did a large deployment, as I mentioned a moment ago, last year as well, that was successful, and they have accelerated in a slightly different way. They are including our technology in some large deals and we’re very optimistic, as we are with both partners, that the pipeline, the generation of demand will start to convert into revenue as this year goes on.
Q4: Do you need to add expense to the business to cope with this increase of activity?
A4: The short answer is no. We’ve built the business really to be able to do business with these partners and we can scale very significantly in terms of revenue with all of these partners before we need to add extra resources to the business. We might put one or two people into the business to cope with bits that are starting to glow white-hot but overall, no we don’t need to increase our expense rate of the business to do business with these partners as the revenue grows.
Actually, what we’re going to see as this year goes on, as the revenue grows, is the burn rate go down as the year goes on, we don’t need to add more expenses to the business in order to do this business.
So, it’s a great positive situation we find ourselves in and the balance sheet is strong, we have plenty of money on the balance sheet too, so we’re really pleased with where we’ve got to.
Q5: I know Actual Experience has announced four partners overall, do you have any potential new ones?
A5: As you know, we’re not resourcing the finding of new partners at the moment, we’re very focussed on the four partners that we’ve talked about. If we are approached by partners, and we have been approached by a couple, then of course we’re going to explore that opportunity or those opportunities when they arise.
So, I am hoping that over the next few months we’ll have a little bit of news to talk about there as well.
