Good morning, and welcome to Spok's Fourth Quarter Investor Call. Today's call is being recorded. On line today, we have Vince Kelly, President and Chief Executive Officer; Mike Wallace, Chief Financial Officer; and Hemant Goel, President of Spok's Operating Company. At this time, for opening comments, I will turn the call over to Mr. Wallace. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter and 2017 year end investor update. Before we discuss our operating results, I want to remind everyone that today's conference call may include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to Spok's future financial and business performance. Such statements may include estimates of revenue, expenses and income as well as other predictive statements or plans, which are dependent upon future events or conditions. These statements represent the company's estimates only on the date of this conference call and are not intended to give any assurance as to actual future results. Spok's actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. Although these statements are based on assumptions that the company believes to be reasonable, they are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please review the Risk Factors section relating to our operations and business environment in which we compete contained in our 2016 Form 10-K, which we expect to file later today; and related documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Please note that Spok assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements from past or present filings and conference calls. With that, I'll turn the call over to Vince.

Thank you, Mike, and good morning. We're pleased to speak with you today about our fourth quarter and full year 2017 operating results. We are encouraged by our performance as we met or exceeded the majority of our key operating metrics for both the quarter and the full year. We achieved these results while both returning capital to our shareholders and continuing to make key strategic investments in our business to enhance and upgrade our operating platforms and sales infrastructure. Before we get into the details of the quarter, I want to underscore where we are strategically with respect to our business plan and outlook. We're a company with the majority of our revenues still coming from our wireless paging base. While this base has slowed in its year-over-year erosion and outperformed our own forecasts on a regular basis. We still believe that will continue to shrink over time and that we need to invest in the growth potential of our healthcare software initiative. These investments have resulted in diminished margins and margin outlook reflected in our latest guidance. However, the investments have also resulted in stabilizing our top-line revenue in the last three quarters of 2017 where our software revenue growth exceeded our paging revenue decline. Also as you have seen, our 2018 revenue guidance range is now exactly the same as our 2017 revenue guidance range which will result in the first year of stable top-line revenue since our founding in late 2004. Since that time we've generated over $983 million in free cash flow. We've returned $468 million to shareholders in the form of dividends and $95 million in the form of share repurchases. Our share repurchases have retired approximately 8.4 million shares and at an average price of just under $11.40 per share. We've paid off…

Thanks Vince. Before I review our financial highlights for the fourth quarter and full year of 2017. I would again encourage you to review our 2017 Form 10-K, which we expect to file later today since it contains far more information about our business operations and financial performance than we will cover on this conference call. As Vince noted, we were pleased with our overall operating performance for the fourth quarter and the full year of 2017 along with the progress we made before meeting our long-term business goals. Revenue contribution from both software and wireless combined with continuously focused expense management helped to maintain solid operating cash flow, EBITDA and operating margins for the quarter and full year 2017 as we continue to invest in our business for long-term growth. Our balance sheet remains strong with a cash balance of $107.2 million at December 31, 2017 and we continue to operate as a debt free company. As a result of this performance, we believe we have a solid financial platform and are well positioned to execute against our long-term goals during 2018 and beyond. In the interest of time today, I will not review our fourth quarter and full year 2017 income statement on a line by line basis. Since much of that information is contained in our news release schedules and Federal filings. However, to the extent you have specific questions about our quarterly financial results, I would be glad to address them during the Q&A portion of this call. Rather I want to focus instead this morning on four specific areas. These include one, a review of certain factors impacting fourth quarter revenue; two, a review of selected items which impacted fourth quarter expenses; three, a brief review of deferred tax assets and the impact of the…

Thank you, Mike and good morning. As you've heard, our sales and maintenance teams delivered software bookings in the fourth quarter of 2017 totaling more than $19 million. This performance was up from last quarter and indicates an increase in total annual bookings of 5.2% over last year. Maintenance revenue renewal rates remain strong at more than 99% for the quarter. More than 100 new healthcare organizations selected Spok Care Connect in 2017 including 21 during the fourth quarter. That means that more than 1900 hospitals now use Spok solutions including all 30 adults and children's health organizations and the current Best Hospitals Honor Roll by U.S. News and World Report. Healthcare remains a key part of our growth and primary focus making up 91% of overall bookings in the U.S. for fourth quarter nearly a third of that business came from hospitals that have never worked with us before. It's important to note that the size of these new deals increased 77% over the same quarter last year another indication of the market acceptance of the breadth of our solutions and its confidence in our clinical communication and collaboration platform. I'd like to share two examples of these types of seven and six figure deals. Among our new customers this quarter is 394 bed not for profit teaching facility in the Washington D.C. area. This customer has chosen Spok to replace one of our competitors call center products which the hospital feels is outdated and siloed. The hospital not only choose Spok to replace that contact center, but it's adding a fully unified platform with the Spok Care Connect solution. They will take full advantage of our directory for enterprise on call scheduling, secure messaging and clinical alerting. Another new customer this quarter is a multi-hospital regional health system…

Thank you, Hemant. With respect to our key goals and business outlook, let me take a few minutes to outline our strategy. As I mentioned in my opening comments, about two years ago, we embarked on a transformation that was a title shift in our strategic direction for healthcare our largest customer segments. This strategy pivot is a five-year plan that signaled a very intentional move from offering our customers point solutions for single product solutions for call center software, alarm management and secured messaging to offering them a single integrated clinical communication and collaboration platform call Spok Care Connect. As we've previously outlined, our decision to make the shift and focus on the Spok Care Connect platform resulted for many reasons including customer needs since our healthcare customers were telling us they needed a more unified approach to communications across our enterprise. The large potential market opportunity as we expand our offering with more than 1900 hospitals we currently serve and introduce our solutions to two thirds of the North American healthcare market, we are currently not working with, business simplification as we've been offering our customers too many different products and multiple versions on several different platforms and competitive positioning. As we concluded that no one else offers a single integrated platform as comprehensive as ours for healthcare communications. For the past two years, we've invested in the additional talent resources and tools to implement our strategic vision. We recruited experts for product strategy and development, created additional work teams, devised a plan to map our existing products to the newly envisioned platform. We recruited people with the experience in enterprise healthcare sales, while providing training and certification for existing teams to increase their focus on the new approach. We've added clinical expertise to build on our communications…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions]

Operator, I'm not seeing anyone in the queue right now. So unless if someone pop in there soon. I think we're probably going to wrap up. So look everyone thank you for joining us this morning. We look forward to speaking with you again after we release our first quarter results in April. Everyone have a great day.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.