Yogesh Gupta
Analyst · Citi. Your line is now open
Thank you, Mike. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today as we announce the results from our first quarter of fiscal 2025. We're extremely pleased with our solid start to the year as you can see from the numbers and the updated guidance in our earnings release. Our annualized recurring revenue or ARR increased 48% over last year in constant currency predominantly driven by ShareFile with additional contribution from the rest of our business. And our net retention rate again surpassed 100%. For the quarter, revenues came in at the high end of our guidance at $238 million up 30% in constant currency showing steady continuous demand for our solutions. Earnings per share of $1.31 significantly exceeded the upper end of the range we provided at the end of Q4, which illustrates that our whole team is executing well, while also keeping expenses in check. Our operating margins of 39% this quarter are indicative of our company wide focus on expense management and execution as well as faster ShareFile integration. So at a high level, our results show several positives and Anthony will take you through the details of the quarter later. Perhaps most important, the integration of ShareFile is going very well as you can see from its significant contribution to ARR, revenues as well as expense savings. Each of the milestones and key areas of integration we anticipated are either on track or ahead of plan. During the quarter, we paid down $30 million on our revolver ahead of our original plan to start paying down debt in second quarter and in line with our intent to de lever rapidly so that we can be ready for the next deal. We remain very focused on prudent capital allocation and on using all facets of our capital allocation strategy to provide solid returns on invested capital. To that end, we also repurchased $30 million of our stock consistent with our goal of returning capital directly to shareholders in the form of opportunistic buybacks. From a macro perspective, we have seen no disruption stemming from the uncertainty in the environment thus far, particularly as it pertains to our relatively modest federal government business and we continue to monitor the developments closely. So all-in, our first quarter of 2025 was very solid across the board and our teams are once again showing their excellence in running the business efficiently while meeting and exceeding our operational targets. Let me now provide a little more detail on ShareFile and revisit a couple of highlights of the deal. We ended Q1 about four months into the integration and with everything proceeding as expected and probably a bit better in many ways. Our transition services agreement with CSG is working out well. While we still have more steps to complete, our progress has been faster than anticipated and we continue to believe that we can complete the integration and reach our 40% operating margin target for the acquired business by the end of this fiscal year. The people integration efforts with our ShareFile colleagues have gone extremely well as the collective teams have embraced our common culture and are moving forward as one. The hiring and integration of teams in locations such as India, Costa Rica and Bulgaria has been rapid and we're excited about the progress on the people front. As a reminder, ShareFile is a native SaaS platform with 100% recurring revenue and solid net retention rates. In addition to the robust durable revenues and cash flow that ShareFile will generate, we now have extensive expertise running a significant SaaS business at scale with excellent gross margins. Before we acquired ShareFile, our SaaS platforms only accounted for around 3% of our total revenues and now SaaS is nearly 30% of our revenue. The addition of ShareFile is helping us in a number of ways. For example, the strong cloud operations platform and significant cash flows from an optimized SaaS business opens up a larger segment of potential M&A candidates. Previously, we looked at many SaaS businesses and were hesitant because their gross margins and operational capabilities were unappealing to us. By the time we are ready to take on another deal, we will have cloud operational capability at scale as well as the additional strong cash flow and balance sheet to seriously consider deals we may have been hesitant about before. I'm incredibly excited about the possibilities, but I also want to make sure that we remain disciplined, focused and operationally competent in every regard when it comes to M&A and the execution of that part of our strategy. In fact, to further enable the execution of our strategy, we are also filing a universal shelf registration statement, which will allow us to access the capital markets with greater agility. While we currently do not have any plans to offer securities under the shelves, it does provide us with additional flexibility to carry out our total growth strategy. And we do see significant opportunities in the M&A market. There are multitude of good companies and products that we believe will be coming to the market and continued higher interest rates have made us meaningfully more competitive for deals when competing against strategic and financial buyers. As I mentioned earlier, ShareFile gives us readymade SaaS experience and expertise and our reputation as the buyer of choice in infrastructure software positions us extremely well in the minds of company founders, management and investors. All of this creates a competitive differentiation for progress. Having a shelf ready to go adds to our advantages and will increase our ability to make acquisitions. Let me now highlight a few of our customer wins from the first quarter. Several leading commercial lenders and banks expanded their use of ShareFile in the first quarter. The wins highlight our financial service organizations are benefiting from purpose-built AI capabilities in the ShareFile product to securely share large documents with their clients, detect when the document contains sensitive information, verify recipient's identity upon access and integrate e-signature into their workflows. The customer feedback we continue to hear is that ShareFile is directly contributing to their revenue streams, workforce efficiency and risk mitigation. Also, in Q1, to AI powered its content recommendations for their customers, one of the world's leading streaming entertainment providers turned to our data platform products for semantic analysis capabilities. Demonstrating our continued impact on shaping our customers digital experiences, a global leader in industrial machinery manufacturing expanded its use of our DevTools products to provide touchscreen user experiences for the industrial machines to drive easier, accessible and more efficient workflows for operators. Two states in the U.S. reaffirm their commitment to use Progress’s intelligent decisioning product to automate policy driven decisions that are part of their digital government infrastructure. And we also saw several global financial, automotive and retail customers significantly expand the use of our DevOps products to optimize, secure and assure compliance of their application infrastructures. In addition, our infrastructure and network management offerings drove strong new wins across Europe and Asia including one of India's newest airports. The common thread behind all these wins, expansions and renewals is our focus on enabling our customers to develop, deploy and manage verifiable and trustworthy AI powered applications and digital experiences. More and more of our customers are leveraging progress to deliver reliable outcomes from often massive unstructured datasets in ways that can dramatically improve work productivity, customer service and ultimately revenue, while increasing compliance and reducing risk. Let me provide a quick update on our AI efforts as it's a major force driving change in almost every industry. AI has been part of our strategy and product roadmap for many years and is core to the ongoing value we're providing our customers. Those of you who have tracked our company over the years would have seen our early assessment and focus on how data would be critical to delivering AI driven applications. The concept of AI has certainly come a long way since then. Today, as our customers continue to rely on progress to power and solve mission critical parts of their business, we have stayed ahead of this transformative technology evolution by ensuring our customers have the tools, processes and expertise to fully leverage AI's potential. Our AI efforts continue to be focused on three areas. Number one, help our customers build great agentic and AI powered applications and experiences that automate workflows and generate accurate, valid, and verifiable answers that are in context relevant to the audience and leverage data in a secure and trustworthy manner. Number two, offer agentic and AI capabilities within our own products to make them much easier to use and to deliver greater value to the users. And three, use AI internally to be operationally more efficient, managing costs while investing in areas where we need to invest. To accelerate these efforts, one of our engineering leaders recently stepped up to spearhead our AI efforts across the company as Progress's Chief AI Officer. Ed Keisling has been part of Provost's engine leadership for many years during which he has to help transform that organization and we knew the importance of appointing someone who can drive such transformation again. In this new role, which supports directly to me, Ed is helping us innovate and invest in AI while also maximizing cost efficiency benefits through AI. In many ways, these efforts are balancing each other out as we continue to focus on retaining, supporting and innovating for our customers. In summary, the first quarter of 2025 was a great quarter financially and operationally. I want to thank all our employees for all their hard work. We are delighted that we have such a strong employee base and the addition of ShareFile further strengthens our organization and culture. We expect to have ShareFile fully integrated by end of the fiscal year and we will continue to pay down our debt aggressively. At the same time, we're keeping our seat at the table in the M&A market and always looking for great acquisitions. We're also keeping our eyes on a larger global macro environment and remain confident that our customers trust progress to continue to deliver in an ever-changing world. Thank you again for joining us this evening. And now let me pass it over to Anthony for more details around our results and the guidance.