Crexendo, Inc. (CXDO) Q4 2025 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Greetings. Welcome to the Crexendo Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Jeff Korn, CEO and Chairman of the Board. You may begin.

Thank you, John, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Crexendo's Q4 Year-end 2025 Earnings Conference Call. As John just said, I'm Jeff Korn, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer. Joining me today are Doug Gaylor, our President and COO; Ron Vincent, our Chief Financial Officer; and Jon Brinton, our Chief Revenue Officer. In a moment, Jon will read our safe harbor statement. After that, I'll provide an overview of our performance and strategy. Ron will then dive into the financials, and Doug will close with an operational and business update before we open it up for questions. Jon, would you please read the safe harbor?

Thank you, Jeff. I want to take this opportunity to remind listeners that this call will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides a safe harbor for such forward-looking statements. All statements made in this conference call other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, words like believe, expect, anticipate, estimate, will and other similar statements of expectation identifying forward-looking statements. Investors should be aware that any forward-looking statements are based on assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here today. These risk factors are explained in detail in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Form 10-K for fiscal year December 31, 2025, and the Forms 10-Q as filed. Crexendo does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. I'd now like to turn the call back to Jeff. Jeff?

Thank you, Jon. I am extremely pleased with our 2025 performance and very proud of the team that delivered on our commitments of profitable double-digit organic growth. This month marks my third anniversary as CEO. It has been an impactful and impressive period for both the team and the company. When I assumed leadership in 2023, Crexendo was not GAAP profitable and was burning approximately $100,000 per month. Revenue was roughly $53 million, and following those results, the stock had fallen to nearly $1.40. Over the last three years, we constantly delivered positive cash flows from operations. We have grown annual revenue by more than $15 million. We have expanded profitability and EBITDA while adding staff, enhancing products and investing in AI, security and infrastructure. Our software platform has scaled meaningfully. We have grown from just over 4 million users three years ago to more than 7 million users today, approximately 75% growth in under three years. We made clear commitments. We committed to disciplined execution. We committed to double-digit organic growth. We committed to achieving GAAP profitability. We committed to improving our services, products and operational efficiency. We committed to integrating and optimizing prior acquisitions, and we committed to finding an accretive significant acquisition. We have kept every one of those commitments and it is reflected in the increase in our stock price over the last three years. And I particularly want to thank all of our shareholders for their confidence in me and the team. In 2025, we generated full year net income of $5.1 million and non-GAAP income of $11.4 million on revenue of $68.2 million, which represents 12% year-over-year organic growth. Fourth quarter revenue increased 11% to $18.1 million with net income of $1.2 million and non-GAAP net income of $2.8 million. This marked our 10th consecutive GAAP profitable quarter. With the acquisition of one of our NetSapiens licensees, Estech Systems, or ESI, which we announced yesterday, we are now well on our way to reaching $100 million in annual revenues. Importantly, we committed to driving profitable organic growth while pursuing accretive acquisitions. Having successfully delivered on the organic component, our announced acquisition of ESI demonstrates how we will now use accretive growth -- now have accretive growth through disciplined M&A strategy. My guiding principle on acquisitions is simple. Management must believe the transaction will be accretive with -- in no more than two quarters. ESI meets that standard and will be a great acquisition for Crexendo. We acquired ESI for $35 million, consisting of $27.3 million in cash and $7.7 million in common stock, representing approximately 1.35x unaudited 2025 revenue. ESI generated approximately $26 million in 2025. And please note again, as I said, those are unaudited numbers. And if those numbers and results are confirmed by the audit would mean approximately $2.23 million in income with roughly 80% recurring UCaaS revenue. Gross margins on UCaaS averaged approximately 86%, with the majority of their customers on five-year contracts. Following the completion of their audit, we will provide you with audited financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2025, along with pro forma financial information that will be filed on Form 8-K/A prior to or in connection with our Q1 2026 Form 10-Q filing. Please understand, due to SEC regulations, we are somewhat limited on what numbers we can discuss in light of the fact that the audit is not completed. The acquisition is expected to increase Crexendo's revenue, earnings and cash flow following the March 1, 2026, closing. It is a great acquisition for us. It is strategic, it is complementary, and I am confident it will make us a better and stronger company. As I said, ESI is a highly complementary business. Founded in 1987 and headquartered in Plano, Texas, it is a well-managed organization with approximately 85 employees. Through facilities consolidation, licensing optimization, cross utilization of employees, operational efficiencies, network expense improvements and Oracle Cloud infrastructure migration, we see meaningful cost synergies. We will coordinate certain functions, which will also save money and both organizations stronger and more efficient. We will work working on coordinating legal, marketing and support quickly. There are strong revenue synergies through cross-selling through the expanded channel reach and platform expansion. I see ESI employees working across the entire organization and their deep bench strength may enable us to use ESI employees to fill some open positions within the Crexendo organization. ESI shares a passion for customer service and customer service remains a core differentiator for us. We continue to lead the industry in G2 customer satisfaction rankings, and these are based on verified customer reviews. Our AI strategy is advancing aggressively. Early feedback on CAIRO, our AI receptionist AI assistant has been highly encouraging as has the potential to -- and it has the potential to transform the SMB market by providing affordable access to enterprise-type technologies to the SMB market. We were recently recognized for the second consecutive year with the Generative AI Product of the Year Award, and we received 42 additional G2 Winter 2026 awards. Further, our newly launched marketplace will accelerate partner deployment, expand monetization and create incremental revenue share opportunities. Three years ago, when I took over, we committed to transforming this company. We moved from cash burn to sustained profitability. We restored financial discipline. We scaled the platform. We strengthened governance. We added leadership and engineering talent. We grew revenue, improved margins and increased shareholder value. And now with ESI, we are adding accretive acquisitions to help accelerate that trajectory. In conclusion, I think it's important to point out that starting last year and continuing through this year, we have and are making deliberate and meaningful investments in our platform, in engineering talent, AI optimization and strengthening our security infrastructure. These were not optional improvements. They were strategic decisions to ensure that we protect our business, safeguard our customers and continue to lead in a rapidly evolving cloud communication market. We are building not just for today, but for the next generation of our platform, scalable, secure, resilient and innovation-driven. These investments position us to stay ahead of emerging threats, accelerate product development and deliver differentiated value to our partners and customers. In addition, we added resources to sales and marketing to strengthen our competitive position. While these investments require discipline and capital today, we fully expect them to generate substantial dividends in the future through stronger growth, expanded margins and long-term shareholder value. Based on our track record, we are confident we will continue to deliver, and I firmly believe our most significant opportunities remain ahead of us. With that, I will turn the call over to Ron for more detail on the financials and then Doug to discuss operations and some of our AI initiatives. Ron, would you walk us through the financials?

Thank you, Jeff. Good afternoon, everyone. Our financial results for the quarter are as follows. As Jeff mentioned, our consolidated revenue for the quarter increased 11% to $18.1 million compared to $16.2 million for the fourth quarter of the prior year. Our service revenue for that quarter increased 8% to $8.6 million. Our software solutions revenue for the quarter increased 18% to $8.3 million and product revenue for the quarter decreased 6% to $1.1 million. Our service revenue gross margin for the quarter increased by 300 basis points year-over-year to 60%. Software solutions revenue gross margin for the quarter decreased by 500 basis points year-over-year to 63%. Product revenue gross margins for the quarter had no change over the prior year. Consolidated revenue gross margins for the quarter decreased by 100 basis points year-over-year to 60%. Our remaining performance obligations increased to $89.1 million as compared to $87.9 million at September 30, 2025, and $85.6 million at December 31, 2024. Operating expenses for the quarter increased 8% to $16.9 million compared to $15.6 million for the fourth quarter of the prior year. The operating margin for the quarter was 6% as compared to 4% for the same period of the prior year, a 200 basis point increase. Net income of $1.2 million for the quarter or $0.04 per basic and diluted common share. That's compared to net income of $500,000 or $0.02 per basic and diluted common share for the fourth quarter of the prior year. Non-GAAP net income of $2.8 million for the quarter, $0.09 per basic and diluted common share. That's compared to non-GAAP net income of $2 million or $0.07 per basic and $0.06 per diluted common share for the fourth quarter of the prior year. EBITDA for the quarter was $2 million. That's compared to $1.5 million for the fourth quarter of the prior year. And adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $2.8 million or 15.3% of total revenue. That's compared to $2.2 million or 13.3% of total revenue for the fourth quarter of the prior year. Our financial results for the full year are as follows: Total revenue for the year increased 12% to $68.2 million. Service revenue for the year increased 6% to $33.8 million. Our software solutions revenue increased 27% to $29.7 million. Our product revenue for the year decreased 16% to $4.7 million. Service revenue gross margins decreased by 1% year-over-year to 58%. Software solutions revenue gross margin increased by 1% year-over-year to 72%. Product revenue gross margins decreased by 3% to 40% and consolidated revenue gross margins increased by 1% year-over-year to 63%. Operating expenses for the year increased 8% to $63.5 million as compared to $59 million for the prior year. Net income of $5.1 million and $0.17 per basic common share and $0.16 per diluted common share. That's compared to net income of $1.7 million or $0.06 per basic and diluted common share for the prior year. Non-GAAP net income of $11.4 million for the year, that's $0.38 per basic and $0.36 per diluted common share. EBITDA for the year was $8 million compared to $5.2 million for the prior year. And adjusted EBITDA for the year was $11.2 million or 17% of total revenue as compared to $8.2 million or 13.5% of total revenue for the prior year. Our cash and cash equivalents at December 31, 2025, was $31.4 million as compared to $18.2 million at the end of the prior year. Cash provided by operating activities for the year of $9.3 million compared to $6.3 million for the prior year. With our cash provided by operating activities of $9.3 million and our $18,000 in capitalized expenditures, we generated non-GAAP free cash flow of $9.3 million for the year. That's 14% free cash flow margin. Cash used for investing activities for the year was $18,000 and cash provided by financing activities for the year was $3.9 million. With that, I'll turn it over to Doug Gaylor, our President and COO, for additional comments on sales and business operations.

Thanks, Ron. I'm extremely pleased with our record Q4 and year-end numbers that exceeded our expectations. 2025 was a great year for Crexendo, a year in which we surpassed both the 6 million and 7 million end-user milestones on our best-in-class software platform. In addition, we were honored to be included into the Russell 2000 Index in 2025, along with being awarded top honors in 42 different categories for cloud communication providers by the leading business software review website g2.com. Our successful year culminated in a strong fourth quarter that was our 10th consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability and our 29th consecutive quarter of non-GAAP net income. Our GAAP profitability continues to be positively affected by managing our costs and driving synergies within the business while attaining double-digit organic growth levels of 11% for the quarter and 12% for the year. Our strong GAAP income, combined with strong free cash flow allows us to continually reinvest in our people and our products to continue delivering the best solutions and best customer satisfaction in the industry. As we have previously discussed, our large project of migrating all of our legacy hosted infrastructure to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OCI, was targeted for completion early this year. And I am pleased to announce that we have successfully completed the full migration of all of our hosted infrastructure licensees to OCI and we will have the last of our legacy NetSapiens data centers decommissioned later this month, which should help improve our margins going forward. We continue to see tremendous organic growth from our software solutions segment of the business, which grew at 18% for the quarter and saw 28% organic growth for 2025. Our software solutions segment had a very strong quarter with 14 upgrade orders from our existing licensees, combined with five new logos that we won that chose Crexendo for their platform of choice moving forward. For the year, we had over 40 upgrade orders from our existing licensees, combined with winning 14 new logos. Of those 14 new logos, we continue to win new licensees moving to Crexendo from Metaswitch and BroadSoft, amongst others, and we continue to see opportunities created by uncertainties created by the competition. We are winning these customers as our unique pricing and support model for our software solutions platform, combined with our robust feature set, our open APIs and our deliverable AI applications and integrations allow us to differentiate ourselves from the rest of our competition at a much stronger price point than they might currently be paying. You may have also seen a press release during Q4 where we announced a significant win of landing a long-standing telecom provider, Altigen to the Crexendo family of licensees on our platform. Altigen has been a force in the telecom industry for over 30 years, and their decision to deploy the Crexendo platform for their future growth is a true validation of the power of our platform. Our telecom services Retail segment grew at 5% organically for the quarter, and our telecom services revenue was up 8% organically, offset by a small reduction in product revenue to reach the blended 5% increase. As we have previously mentioned, the reduction in product revenue was anticipated as we have proactively reduced selling some lower-margin product opportunities on the managed services front to help improve margins. We continue to see strong demand for our offerings from our channel partners and our master agent technology service distributors and expect retail segment revenue to grow at a faster pace. The master agent technology service distributors saw a 46% increase in sales bookings year-over-year, and we expect that momentum to continue, especially with our announcement last month of adding a leading technology service distributor, AppDirect, to our partner lineup. We have already seen a strong pipeline of opportunities being generated from AppDirect and are excited about the future prospects of this partnership. We had our strongest sales bookings quarter ever for this segment of the business in Q4 and are encouraged by the trends we are seeing. Our remaining performance obligation, also referred to as our backlog continues to grow and is now at $89.1 million, an increase of 4% from Q4 of 2024. Our remaining performance obligation number is the sum of the remaining contract values for our telecom services and our software solutions customers that will be recognized on a sliding scale over the next 60 months, and it's a very strong indicator of our future revenue stream. Consolidated gross margin for Q4 was 60%, which was anticipated as we have our annual user group meeting in Q4 that has an impact on margins for the quarter. But for the year, consolidated gross margin was 63%, which was up from 62% in 2024. And we continue to see strong gross margins in our software solutions segment, where gross margins were 72% for the year compared to 71% in 2024. Our telecom services segment gross margin was 58% for the quarter, which was up from 54% in Q4 of 2024. And for the year, the telecom services segment gross margin was 56%, which was on par with 2024. Our telecom services gross margins were positively affected in Q4 by our focus on higher-margin UCaaS sales and less on low-margin product sales. We're confident that we should continue to see gross margin improvements in both segments of the business in the future as we start to recognize cost savings from our completed consolidation of our data centers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as well as our near completion of our legacy retail classic migration. Jeff mentioned artificial intelligence before, and artificial intelligence will be the biggest game changer in communications since the move to the cloud began over 20 years ago. Crexendo is leading the AI charge with many new releases that allow small and midsized businesses to be more efficient and productive. Crexendo's AI solutions are focused on helping businesses make more money as opposed to saving money. Our AI solutions are targeted at making small and midsized businesses more successful and more profitable by giving them affordable efficiency tools to help them run their business. Our current roster of AI solutions includes our AI call recording with sentiment analysis, our contact center AI powered by ChatGPT, and our most exciting release yet, Crexendo's AI receptionist orchestrator or CAIRO that was released in January. CAIRO allows new and existing customers to leverage the power of an AI receptionist to answer all incoming calls, answer frequently asked questions, schedule, reschedule or cancel appointments, access customer records and talk to a live person when needed. For the typical SMB customer, this technology will allow their business to be more effective and productive for a minimal cost, while at the same time allowing Crexendo to significantly increase its average revenue per account. Crexendo's average retail revenue per account is roughly about $350 per month and early adoption numbers for our CAIRO solution could increase that average by over 25%. Crexendo's Ecosystem Vendor Partner Program or our EVP program, as we call it, that was introduced last year continues to gain traction and is now has officially 41 partners involved in the program. These partners provide products, software and solutions to our platform that allow Crexendo and our partners to benefit from selling these solutions to end users that will make their businesses more efficient, productive and profitable. The EVP program is generating new revenue streams, and we are very encouraged by the growth potential. Crexendo had a great year in 2025, and we continue to meet and exceed our targeted goals. The goal I am most excited about is getting to the $100 million revenue run rate, hopefully by the end of 2026. With our recently announced acquisition of ESI, I believe we are well on our way to meeting that target. The acquisition will be transformative to Crexendo, and I am confident that the time between our last acquisition and this one will be worth the wait. We have always stated that we will be acquisitive, but that we will be patient to wait for the right opportunity to present itself. That patience will be rewarded with our acquisition of ESI for all the reasons that Jeff previously highlighted. I couldn't be more excited about the future direction and opportunity for Crexendo. Our strong double-digit organic growth, combined with our ESI acquisition and our GAAP profitability and strong positive cash flow have laid a great foundation for our future success. We are positioned perfectly with the combination of strong demand for our product offerings along with great solutions, a disruptive pricing model and the best and most talented workforce in the industry to continue our strong growth. We're excited about the additional opportunities to drive growth and innovation that our new AI offerings will infuse into our business, and we're very optimistic that applications like our AI receptionist will continue to drive even more demand and higher revenues. We're committed to delivering the best UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS offerings in the sector to our customers and our partners and the best returns for our shareholders. As the fastest-growing platform solution in the country, now supporting over 7 million end users, we're laser-focused on growing our business, enhancing our solutions, improving our efficiencies and continue to return strong results. With that, I'll turn it back over to Jeff for any further comments.

Thank you, Doug. Actually, I do not have any further comments. So, John, you may open the call up to questions.

Absolutely. [Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Joshua Reilly with Needham.

How should we think about the impact of the ESI acquisition, the scale and subsequent customer acquisition cost for your retail business and the benefit over the next few years of adding this scale? And maybe any more color on the magnitude of the EBITDA margin benefit from the acquisition?

Well, let me start backwards. We're really not in a position to discuss EBITDA margins until the audit is completed under SEC guidelines. So I wish I could answer that for you, but I can't, Josh. In regard to customer acquisition costs, I will let Ron answer that.

Yes. So, as far as acquisition goes, the acquisition of a large customer base and a business combination, it generates in the multiples that we pay, similar customer acquisition costs or a little lower than our actual organic customer acquisition cost from that standpoint. On a go-forward basis, I don't think there's a material impact. We should have similar customer acquisition costs because there's not really an economies of scale on the acquisition cost other than marketing. And so we're going to continue to our existing marketing spend, and we'll benefit from additional customers from additional marketing we may provide for the acquisition target. But that would be minimal at this point based on my estimate.

Got it. That's helpful. And then...

There is third question, sorry.

Well, I have some other questions, but that kind of wrapped up that first piece, I think. As we think about the free cash flow for the year, the last couple of years, you've done a really good job of converting 50% plus of your EBITDA to free cash flow. Is there any significant onetime items in 2026 that investors should be considering from the acquisition that would impact this ratio of conversion of EBITDA to free cash flow in 2026?

Yes. So we don't have any anticipated large capital improvements that would impact our free cash flow. So we should generate similar type of free cash flow from our adjusted EBITDA.

Got it. And then last question for me is, if you look at some of my recent channel checks at industry conferences, it seems like you have a pretty strong pipeline of potential new licensees. I guess what are you hearing in terms of the demand environment there? And what key points are you hearing from them in terms of their consideration of converting from a legacy platform maybe to NetSapiens in 2026?

I'm going to let Jon answer that, Josh.

Josh, this is Jon. Yes, we continue to have a high degree of partner interest. We continue to have many new opportunities looking at the platform. As you know from your conversations, some of them are coming from legacy platforms that don't have the investment level today that the NetSapiens platform does. Many of them like our sessions, not seats model across when you look at commercially our advantages. And then as Doug had mentioned, what we're doing with AI applications in our ecosystem. So I think what many of those partners see is that we do have a definitive road map to help them to modernize their solutions and stay competitive in the market. And because of that, we continue to have strong demand for new licensees for the platform.

The next question comes from Mike Latimore with Northland Capital.

Congrats on the great year and the ESI looks like it's a very high quality here. You highlighted the strong services bookings in the quarter. Was that mainly driven by the master agents? Or was there some broader factors there?

Yes. I think we had a pretty good contribution across the board. We had great direct sales. We had a couple of very large opportunities on our direct sales side. The TSDs, technology service distributors actually had a great quarter for us. So we had -- fourth quarter was, as I said, a record retail quarter for us on the sales bookings, pretty excited. And the nicest part about some of the activity we're seeing is a lot larger type opportunities, and we won a couple of opportunities in Q4 that were upwards of 1,000 stations. So we're seeing some nice retail opportunity sizes coming from both the direct and from the master agents.

Okay. Great. And then on the service gross margin that ticked up nicely. Is that sustainable, do you think?

Yes. So that's as a result of the revenue growth that we're seeing at the current rate, I think that percentage is sustainable. At this time, I'm not projecting further increases, but let's take a look at it in a couple of quarters.

Great. And then just last one for me on your AI receptionist. Like what percent of your customer base do you think that's applicable to or would have interest in that?

Yes, it's a great question, Mike. I think that we feel like the CAIRO, which is, again, our Crexendo AI Receptionist and Orchestrator, we think that, that is applicable to almost all of our customers out there. Now when I say that, that means that customers have to evaluate it and make sure that's a good fit for their business. But we think that AI receptionist is going to have a tremendous take rate for us. We just introduced it in mid-January. The early sales and early feedback we've gotten from customers has been top notch. So we're going to continue to monitor that. But again, if you think about the benefits it brings to a business, I can't see any many reasons why a business would decide that, that's not for them. I think it's going to be a very affordable option for businesses to consider. Jon is going to add a little bit.

Yes. One other dimension on that, Mike, is we've also made that available for our NetSapiens platform licensees to offer to their customers, and we've had really strong interest from that community as well. So it's the type of thing that it's available on our retail offer, but we'll make it available across our whole community through our ecosystem program, and we're really excited about that part of the opportunity, too.

And Mike, as I indicated, initial reaction has been very strong, but we're not in it long enough to give you sales projections yet, but wait, we will see what kind of adoption we're getting, but we're very excited about potential adoption.

Sounds like a great start there. Congrats on the year and the acquisition.

Next question comes from Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street.

Yes, Jeff, you entered 2025 with let's grow double digits organically and do it profitably. It wasn't guidance, but it was kind of the goal. Is that still the goal? Is 2026, can we anticipate organic growth in that double-digit range profitably?

Yes, Eric, I am still gearing for a 10% organic -- double-digit organic growth even with the expenditures we -- that I spoke about. It would be again, we are making the necessary investments we need to make in the business. This is imperative to me. I intend when I leave this job, believe it far stronger than when I came into it and with all the bells and whistles for us to be the lead company for maybe generations to come. Nonetheless, we will do the investments carefully, strategically with gearing toward double-digit organic growth at the same time.

Okay. And then the congratulations on getting the ESI transaction done. I think you mentioned that it was a $26 million revenue run rate for 2025. What was the growth in 2025?

That growth was from 2024 was about 6% to 7%. Again, we don't have the audited financials, but in that range of 6% to 7%. So good, better growth than the industry, a little bit smaller than what we saw in our Q4 retail services growth, but really strong growth.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from George Sutton with Craig-Hallum.

Jeff, you ran through this real quick. I wondered if we could just spend a second on when you acquire a licensee like you have done with ESI, can you just walk through all the things you can do operationally to improve that business? Because I don't think that's clear people assume you're just buying a licensee and there isn't that much you can do. I think there's quite a bit you can do. You did walk through a few things. Just wondered if you could detail that a little bit.

Sure. There is a lot we can do. Fortunately, the acquisition we acquired here was already well run. And frankly, in anticipation of sale, they had reduced their staff to a sustainable number that makes sense. So, automatically, when you get an acquisition, you go, I can cut 20% of the staff. I'm not in a position to do that there because they're so well run. But nonetheless, there are a number of coordinated things we can do. I mentioned that they have four or five employees that can actually help us with Crexendo. We have a number of employees who can help them. And as we get to know each other better, it will enable us to do less hires on both side of the equation that we were thinking about. So there's some efficiencies there. We're going to combine a lot of licensing, which will -- economy of scale will have some substantial savings for us down the road. We are going to move ESI off of their servers onto our Oracle Cloud and get the discounts from there. There's going to be substantial savings there and long-term efficiencies. Back-office functions are going to be coordinated. There's going to be efficiencies there, and there's going to be a number of cross-sell opportunities, which I expect to have large efficiencies on. So I may have run through it, but we would not have acquired this if I did not see a potential number of efficiencies, strong growth and operational combination that makes a lot of sense to both teams.

You mentioned your patience relative to making an acquisition. I'm just curious, on the other side, you have seller patience in some cases or at least it's not the right time for the seller. What happens when you acquire a large licensee like this to the other licensees who sort of want to get teed up themselves for a similar opportunity?

Well, I fully expect that this will tee up some interest in some of our licensees, and they will reach out to us regarding a potential acquisition. This happens all the time. There are several that we're looking at, not immediately, but in a quarter or two, we may be in a position to do it. Obviously, a press release like we put out and the community knowing that we're in acquisitive mode will open more doors for us. And it makes a lot of sense on both ends. If we acquire a licensee, there's automatic efficiencies because we don't have to migrate customers onto our platform. There's automatic efficiencies there because their customers don't have to worry about having to move to a different platform or seeing a change in their service. And there's operational efficiencies and that the employees are already used to working with the NetSapiens platform. So, this opens a lot of exciting opportunities for us, and I'm very enthused about that, George.

And the next question comes from Josh Nichols with B. Riley Securities.

This is Matthew on for Josh Nichols. Congrats on the ESI closing a strong year. I guess to start off, on the cost synergy side with ESI, can you help us frame the time line for the facilities consolidation and the OCI migration of their workloads in terms of like how quickly you expect those savings to flow through to EBITDA?

You know what, I have not discussed that with the ESI team yet, so I don't want to surprise them by doing it on the conference call, and I really need to have our teams work with their teams to figure out the timing, but I would hope it would be done sometime this year.

Got it. Great. And I guess just more generally, what -- can you help us walk through what excites you most about the setup this year for the combined company?

I am just -- the team and I went out to Dallas on Friday and talked to the ESI employees and the enthusiasm and the excitement they had for working for a bigger organization for helping us to grow really enthused me. I must have had 15 of the employees come over to me and tell me, we're going to make you proud. I don't get my son telling me that often. So this was really good news. The people here at both Crexendo and at our platform are excited about the growth. The enthusiasm I see in our employees for our plans for our future growth and to build -- to continue to build the best platform in the industry and provide the best services in the industry just excite me every morning. I get up excited to get to work, to work with our people and to continue to do this. I think this is going to be a great year for us.

And I would just add to that, Josh, or Matt, if you think about that meeting that we had with their team out there, they've got a tremendously tenured group of people there. And a lot of their people have known a lot of our people for a long time, including the executive management team. We've known their executive management team for quite some time. A lot of our support people have been working with their support people, some of them for longer than 10 years. So this is really one of the true benefits we have in fishing in our stock fishing pond is that they know us, we know them. There's not a lot of surprises. And they welcome the announcement, as Jeff highlighted, because when they were thinking about a potential change in their business strategy and doing an acquisition, they could have sold to anybody. And to sell to somebody that was a known entity and a friendly, that's a whole lot better than anything else that could have been accomplished. And so they're excited about the opportunity and their excitement is going to lead to us taking this to much, much higher heights.

Great. Sounds exciting. I guess just one quick one for me, last one. Where do you see the organic pace of growth going for software solutions given it grew faster for most of 2025 and sort of leveled out at 18% in Q4?

I would hope it will remain at the same level, but I'm not going to commit to that. And obviously, our -- as Doug described, our offering is compelling. It saves you a substantial amount of money, and I believe you're getting better services and better products. Nonetheless, to migrate is not an inexpensive concept. And we have some people sitting on the fence waiting looking at the macroeconomic conditions and deciding is this the right time to write a $400,000 or $500,000 jack. So I know these deals will come in, but I can't tell you what quarter.

And I would also highlight that the Q4 number was only skewed a little bit by the fact that we have our UGM, which is our user group meeting in Q4, and so that number didn't grow incrementally as much as our software solutions revenue from our licensees grew. So the fact that we had five new logos and 14 upgrades was very consistent. So we don't see that slowing down at all. We still see tremendous demand within our licensee base and new logos for the software solutions division. So I think that was skewed a little bit by the fact that our user group meeting that we have every year in Q4 didn't expand percentage-wise as much as our growth in the licensee division.

We have no further questions in the queue. I would like to turn the floor back to Jeff Korn for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you, John, and I thank everybody for their attention. I hope we did a good job of explaining just how excited we are both about this acquisition and our future. We see things continuing to improve, and it is a very, very exciting time for us. And I look forward to meeting you all again in May when we announce Q1 results. So, thank you for your attention, and have a great rest of the day.

This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.