Roper Technologies, Inc. (ROP) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Good morning. Naropa Technologies conference call will now begin. Today's call is being recorded. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the 0 key. I would now like to turn the call over to Zack Moxcey. Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Zack Moxcey: Good morning, and thank you all for joining as we discuss the third quarter 26 financial results for Roper Technologies. Joining me on the call this morning are Neil Hunn, President and Chief Executive Officer; Jason Conley, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Brandon Cross, Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer; and Shannon O'Callaghan, Senior Vice President of finance. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release announcing our financial results. The press release also includes replay information for today's call. We prepared slides to accompany today's call, which are available through the webcast and are also available on our website. Now if you please turn to page 2. We begin with our Safe Harbor statement. During the course of today's call, we will make forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties as described on this page, in our press release and in our SEC filings. You should listen to today's call in the context of that information. And now please turn to page 3. Today, we will discuss our results primarily on adjusted non GAAP basis. For the third quarter, the difference between our GAAP results and adjusted results consists of the following items. Amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets; transaction-related expenses associated with completed acquisitions financial impacts associated with our minority investment in Indicor and lastly, collected on Outgo's beneficial interest, which is the residual amount owed to Outgo after it sells receivables to a third party. and is classified within cash flows from investing activities. Reconciliations can be found in our press release and in the appendix of this presentation on our website.

Operator: And now if you please turn to page 4, I will hand the call over to Neil. After our prepared remarks, we will take questions from our telephone participants. Neil?

Laurence Neil Hunn: Thank you, Zack, and thanks to everyone for joining us this morning. You can see our agenda on page 4, so let's get into it. Next slide, please. As we turn to page 5, I want to highlight 3 takeaways. First, we delivered solid third quarter results. Including 7% organic revenue growth and increased DEPS guidance for the year. Second, AI momentum continues to build, and we are pleased with the progress in the quarter. Our businesses are bringing new products to market, and we are increasingly encouraged by the breadth of that progress, what these products will do for our customers. And third, we are active again on the acquisition front completing 3 bolt-ons with our long-standing capital allocation discipline. Starting with our results. Total revenue grew 8%, organic revenue grew 7%. EBITDA grew 7%. And DEPS grew 15%. At a high level, had a strong quarter. And despite a few of our larger businesses, we had another encouraging quarter for Deltek although we continue to take a wait and see approach. Continue to see nice supply side recovery at DAT, unfortunately Neptune continues to face subdued meter market conditions. Based on these results, we are also increasing our full year DEPS guidance. It was a solid quarter and Jason will walk you through the financial details in a moment. Turning to AI. Since our last call, our businesses have introduced a broad range of products that apply AI to the specialized task and workflows our customers manage every day. Let me share a few examples. First, Vertafore launched agents for submission processing benefit plans, and docket research, and has now added 2 agents that automate policy processing for independent agencies. Since the beginning of the year, Vertafore has developed and launched 12 workflow automation agents with many, many more in development. At Aderant, 7 AI agents are now in early access to help law firms bill more accurately and collect cash faster. The appeals agent helps draft billing appeals The collection agent prioritizes overdue accounts. And the time agent improves billing descriptions. These are practical uses of AI to reduce administrative work and help law firms run more efficiently. Another example is PowerPlan. Where a new intelligent unitization product tackles a significant industry challenge More than $180 billion of capital investments awaiting detailed asset class classification, across The US electric utilities. Our purpose built AI capability analyzes project accounting data and recommends how cost, should be allocated to individual assets. By accelerating that process, it helps utility recover their capital investments and earn returns sooner bringing forward revenue, earnings and cash flow and the productivity gains are substantial. Customers are completing this work in minutes that previously took days, weeks. This is another powerful example of our focus across Roper. Putting AI to work to help our customers grow, perform better, and operate more efficiently. Brent work by Raffi and the team at PowerPlan. At Strata, financial decision intelligence helps health care finance teams identify what needs attention, and understand what is driving performance. In a few minutes, I am gonna double click on this specifically. At Central Reach, Report Draft AI is designed to improve provider productivity and economics. Clinical reauthorization reports typically take 9 to 12 hours per learner, much of which is non billable. By automating data gathering and preparing a draft, for clinician input and review, the product frees up substantial capacity for billable care creating opportunities for providers to serve more learners supporting revenue growth, and improving operational efficiency with their existing clinical teams. And Foundry introduced new AI capabilities for visual effects while SubSplash launched work management products that bring AI and automation into church operations. What is encouraging is both the breadth of this activity and how specific these products are to the markets we serve. They address work our customers know well, work that takes time, requires specialized knowledge, and matters to how their organizations operate. We continue to see a substantial opportunity to help customers do work more efficiently and effectively and we are excited to partner with our customers. For across the enterprise to realize the promise of AI. Our confidence and opportunity is grounded in the same advantages that have always made our vertical market software businesses strong. Deep domain expertise, embedded workflows, unique data assets, trusted customer relationships, and scale distribution. Our businesses know their customers' workflows and where AI can save time and improve the decisions. Each business develops products close to its customers, while our AI accelerator team helps speed development and share reasonable approaches across the portfolio. We are still early in commercialization and are starting to see adoption and monetization of our AI solutions. Importantly, our products change how customers do work. So adoption will develop over time. As customers use our products, that experience will help our businesses refine the products and expand our capability remit. there is more work ahead, but we love the progress. We have new products reaching customers across a broad range of markets, and a meaningful opportunity to build from here. Third, we continue to execute our disciplined capital allocation strategy and are encouraged that we are able to execute 3 bolt-on acquisitions during the quarter. Specifically, we deployed $436 million towards bolt-on acquisitions for iPipeline, ProCare and Strata. The common theme is expanding the capabilities and reach of our existing businesses, and in complementary products, expertise and customer relationships in markets we know well. Each acquisition builds on our existing domain expertise and distribution, creating more opportunities to serve customers and drive long term organic growth. Our approach remains consistent. Evaluate each opportunity carefully, and deploy capital where we see attractive long term returns. So, a solid quarter with another impactful step on our AI journey. With that, let me turn the call over to Jason to walk through our financial results, capital allocation activity, and balance sheet position.

Operator: Jason?

Jason Conley: Thanks, Neil, and good morning, everyone. Please turn with me to slide 6 to review our financial performance. Our third quarter was highlighted by solid organic revenue growth, and strong DEPS growth. We delivered revenue of $2.2 billion, up 8% over prior year underpinned by organic growth of 7%. Digging deeper here, organic recurring revenue grew 8% across our 2 software segments. Our enterprise software gross retention remains very high, consistently in the mid-90s. And further, core enterprise bookings were up mid single digits on a TTM basis, EBITDA of $864 million was up 7% and converted to EBITDA margin of 39.8%. Core EBITDA margin was down 30 basis points. With our software segments in aggregate slightly expanding. While our tech segment was down 90 basis points. Our Neptune business delivered more mechanical meters in the quarter, which has a dilutive impact on revenue dollars and margin. Over a longer arc, we expect a continued migration to ultrasonic meters which drives higher lifetime value for customers and Neptune. DEPS of $5.89 was up 15% over prior year and above our guided range of $5.75 to $5.80 on better margin performance. Free cash flow of $805 million represents 37% of revenue, but was down 4% versus prior year given we had timing of interest coupon payments on bonds issued in 2025 and we had a temporary lag in collections at our Illumia business as they moved through an ERP implementation. For the year, we expect free cash flow to be 30% or more of revenue, and with our share repurchase activity, free cash flow per share is expected to grow in the double-digits area. Now if you turn with me to slide 7, I will walk through our financial position and capital deployment. Enabled by seasonally strong free cash flow, and proceeds from the divestiture of Indicor's instrumentation businesses, we reduced our net debt to EBITDA by half a turn within the quarter to land at 2.9x all while simultaneously deploying $436 million towards acquisitions. We finished with over $300 million of cash and $1.3 billion drawn on our $3.5 billion revolver. In the quarter, Indicore announced the sale of the remaining flow controls businesses to Xylem. We expect around $600 million of pretax proceeds sometime in Q4 as the transaction moves through regulatory clearance. Also in the quarter, we acquired 3 bolt-on businesses for iPipeline, ProCare and Strata. Consistent with our acquisition criteria, these tuck-ins play directly into our strategy of increasing organic growth in areas where we have the highest right to win. All 3 tuck-ins are growing faster than their acquiring platforms and coupled with synergies are expected to generate very attractive returns. Looking ahead, we now have more than $6 billion of capacity capital deployment over the next 12 months, given strong free cash flow, which will be enhanced by proceeds from Indicore's sale of its flow controls businesses. In summary, we remain well positioned to deploy capital to the highest risk adjusted return opportunities through a disciplined and analytical process.

Laurence Neil Hunn: Neil, with that, I will turn the call back over to you. Thanks, Jason. As we turn to page 9, let's review our application software segment. Revenue grew 7% in total with organic growth of 6%. EBITDA margins were 43.7%, up 30 basis points year over year. Looking across the segment, AI momentum continues to build with more of our businesses bringing new solutions to market. We also continue to see solid progress on cloud conversions, including encouraging signals at Deltek. Turning to the business highlights. Aderant had another excellent quarter. The team continued to expand its AI agent platform as previously mentioned with capabilities across rates, compliance, and general ledger forecasting. Vertafore delivered growth across its agency, MGA, and carrier businesses and launched 6 new AI agents along with its value based credit model. This value based pricing model is a key enabler of product led growth as customers will utilize credits towards any current and future Agentic solutions on the Velocity platform. As we discussed last quarter, Vertafore strategy starts with high volume labor intensive work. Embedding agents directly into the systems customers already use. The latest launches expand the work those agents can do, and build on the foundation established with Velocity. Deltek had another encouraging quarter with continued strength in its private sector solutions. Government contracting bookings have been solid over the last couple of quarters although the broader market remains uncertain. Against that backdrop, customers are showing increased interest in moving perpetual license to our cloud based offerings. As we discussed earlier, we also saw new AI solution launches at CentralReach with report draft AI and power plan with intelligent unitization. Finally, we have completed 2 bolt-on acquisitions. At ProCare, we added Playground, which helps childcare centers manage enrollment, billing, and daily operations. Playground has exceptional product market fit and is highly complementary to the existing ProCare product stack. We are excited about the growth opportunity from pairing that product with ProCare's distribution and payments infrastructure. And at Strata, we added C. Myers, which helps banks and credit unions plans for growth and manage financial risk. This quarter, I spent a full day with the strata team and finance leaders from 9 of our health system customers at a co-design workshop for financial decision intelligence or FDI Strata's new AI capability for health care finance. FDI became generally available on September 1st. FDI helps finance teams diagnose what is changing in their business and where to intervene to improve performance. For example, when joint replacement margins declined despite rising procedure volumes, FDI automatically explores the underlying drivers from payer mix and reimbursement to labor and implant costs to identify the source of margin pressure and focus management's response. FDI brings together 3 advantages we see from across the portfolio. First, proprietary data and ontologies. Every health system has its own accounting procedures and definitions. 2 hospitals can both report their margin on joint replacements and mean very different things. Strata spent decades mapping thousands of provider general ledgers into a specific common structure supported by health care cost accounting down to the individual patient encounter. That makes meaningful benchmarking possible and gives FDI its foundation. Its calculations use the same coverage measures customers rely on to close their books, with consistent repeatable results that are traceable to the source. You cannot prompt your way to that. It is earned 1 customer implementation at a time over years. Second, turning insight into action. FDI operates inside the Strata platform delivering answers in seconds and connecting those insights directly to the workflows where customers manage costs. Improve margins, and allocate resources. And 3rd, real customer trust. Healthcare finance leaders need confidence in the tools they use to make consequential decisions. Strata has earned that confidence through long customer relationships. Trust is critical to AI adoption, is very hard to replicate. Throughout the workshop, the customer request was simple and consistent. Productivity. Less time assembling and reconciling analysis, and more time working with operating leaders to improve performance. 1 CFO described analysis that took several people hours to being nearly instant and FDI doing a more comprehensive and grounded analysis. This frees finance teams to be are focused on improving profitability and supporting higher quality care. Strata is selling FDI as an add on subscription, creating opportunity to grow recurring revenue. This is just the beginning for FDI. I am excited about the road map ahead. I am proud of the Strata team's development speed, close customer collaboration and pleased with its partnership with our Roper AI accelerator team. Deep vertical data and domain expertise within each business paired with central AI capabilities. That is the model we are scaling across Roper. Now turning to our outlook. We expect to see application software organic growth in the fourth quarter to be similar to that of the third quarter. In the mid single digit plus range. Please turn with us to page 10. Total revenue in our network software segment grew 8% with organic growth of 5%. EBITDA margins were 52.4%, down 130 basis points year over year. Core margins were essentially flat to the prior year. Turning to the business highlights. DAT was strong in the quarter and accelerated growth. Supported by expansion of its network, higher average revenue per user, and continued adoption of its digital freight marketplace solutions. We continue to see encouraging signs in the freight market with the supply side recovery progressing. As we have discussed, we would still like to see stronger load volume before calling it broader recovery. We also completed the Origo bolt on acquisition for iPipeline. Orgo connects UK pension providers investment platforms and financial advisors automating while enabling secure data exchange. It complements iPipeline solutions for selling and administering financial products, expands its presence in the U.K. wealth and retirement market. Foundry also continued to grow and reached a record level of ARR. SoftWriters grew as adoption of its AI order entry solution continued to expand. As I shared last quarter following my visit to Allied-Script, this solution addresses a meaningful customer needs. Reducing the time spent on manual order entry so pharmacy teams can focus more of their capacity on clinical review, customer service, and patient care. Order entry is a starting point, and the team now has additional AI products in beta. SubSplash is tracking in line with our year-1 target and continues to advance today offerings, including enhanced workflow automation. Turning to our outlook, we expect Network Soft organic growth in the fourth quarter to be a touch higher than Q3 and be in the mid-single-digit-plus range based on strength at DAT and Subsplash becoming organic. in Q4. Now please turn to page 11 and let's review our TEP segment. Total revenue and organic revenue both grew 10% in the quarter, exceptional growth in NDI and strong performance at Verathon. EBITDA margins were 34.3%, down 90 basis points year over year. Starting with NDI, the business had another excellent quarter delivering exceptional growth driven by continued demand for its precision measurement solutions. Verathon also delivered a very solid quarter with strength across its BFlex, GlideScope and BladderScan product families. In addition, we are encouraged by the positive customer response to the cFlex single-use cystoscope launch which further expands Verathon's single use portfolio. Neptune had a softer Q3 following a better than expected first half. We now see second half revenue slightly down versus our prior outlook for modest growth. Q3 mix skewed towards mechanical meters, pressure on both revenue and margins, that mix is likely to continue into Q4. We view this as temporary as the long-term secular demand for static meters remains fully intact. Finally, I want to recognize the teams at CIVCO, FMI, Inovonics and RF Ideas, each delivered strong execution and growth in the quarter. Turning to our TEP outlook, we expect organic growth in the fourth quarter to be in the mid single digit range. With that, please turn with us to page 13. On this page, let's walk through our increased full year adjusted DEPS guidance as well as our Q4 outlook. For the full year, we are raising and narrowing adjusted DEPS guidance to a range of $22.35 to $22.40. That represents a $0.15 increase at the midpoint from our prior guide and a $0.95 increase from our original guide. Our full year revenue expectations continue to have total revenue growth north of 8% and organic revenue growth in the 6% area. For Q4, we are establishing our adjusted DEPS guidance DEPS guidance of $5.95 to $6.00 Expect our tax rate to be in the 20% to 21% ZIP code. Now please turn to page 14, and then we will open up to your questions. We conclude with the same 3 points with which we began. First, we delivered solid third quarter results. Revenue grew 8%, organic revenue grew 7%, EBITDA grew 7%, and adjusted EPS grew 15%. We are raising our full year earnings outlook again, reflecting the strength of our year-to-date performance. Second, AI momentum continues to build across Roper. Our businesses launched several new Agentic solutions this quarter expanding the work we can help our customers accomplish. The strata workshop brought that opportunity to life. Our ability to deliver that kind of value rests on advantages built over many years deep domain expertise, proprietary data, embedded workflows, and customer trust. Those advantages are unique to our businesses and central to how our businesses are developing and deploying AI. We are still early, but the opportunity is substantial. As our software takes on more valuable customer work, we have the opportunity to expand our addressable markets and earn a greater share of the value we create. Finally, our capital allocation discipline remains unchanged. This quarter, we deployed $436 million into bolt on acquisitions for iPipeline, ProCare and Strata adding capabilities to establish businesses in markets we know well. As you heard Jason mention, leverage now sits at 2.9x and we have over $6 billion of capital deployment capacity over the next 12 months. With that, we are pleased to be putting capital back to work through M&A. We look to 2027 with cautious optimism about compelling opportunities to deploy capital and accelerate long term cash flow per share compounding. As always, our standard for deploying capital remains the same. We will pursue the opportunities that offer the most attractive durable and long term cash flow per share compounding, whether through acquisitions or opportunistic share repurchases. Looking ahead, our focus is straightforward. Help our customers accomplish more, expand the work our businesses can do for them, and invest the cash we generate where we can compound it most effectively. That is how we will build an even stronger Roper Businesses can do for them, and invest the cash we generate where we can compound it most effectively. That is how we will build an even stronger roper and deliver durable, long-term growth and cash flow per share. As we wrap up, I would also like to welcome Abhijit Dubey to our board of directors who is the CEO and Chief AI Officer at NTT Data. We are delighted to have him join us and look forward to his perspective and contributions as we continue to execute our strategy, broadly deploy AI across our product stacks and our enterprise, and create long term value for our shareholders.

Operator: So with that, let's open up to your questions. Thank you. We will now go to our question and answer session portion of the call. We request that our callers limit their questions to 1 main question and 1 follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, you may do so by pressing the star key followed by the 1 on the touch-tone pound. If you are using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press the star key followed by the number 2. Again, we request that callers limit their questions to 1 main question and 1 follow-up. Your first question is from Joe Giordano from TD Cowen. Your line is now open.

Joe Giordano: Hey, guys. Good morning. Good morning. Maybe 1 just on a specific company, but, like, I am sure you saw, like, the journal article the other day on autism care hours, particularly at PE-owned facilities. And I am just maybe it is for the wrong reasons that these hours are going up at some of these places, but I am just curious, like, what that means for the rollout of stuff like CentralReach. It seems like an almost requirement to have technology like that if you are gonna push the hours to the extent that this seems to be happening.

Laurence Neil Hunn: Well, I think the. I appreciate the question. So I think the thing that is great about CentraReach's solutions is that it is all about appropriate care that is auditable, that is to the standards; and we-- There was an article or there is a flare up on this about a year ago, and we looked across the CentraReach customer base and it was, like, the most compliant set of customers. I think it is in-- Minnesota. I forget where it was a year or so ago. On some fraud claims, and it was the automation with CentralReach was the cleanest set of providers in the jurisdiction. So same thing here. I mean, it is just a good audit sort of backbone when you use the CentralReach, our automated systems here.

Joe Giordano: If I think about the fourth quarter guidance, I am just curious, like I know it is early for 2027, but are these exit rates fair starting points for us to think about moving forward? Like, I am curious, like, something like Neptune. What-- that is a project centric business. it is hard for us to kinda contextualize. If that is-- what are the prospects, like, into next year?

Laurence Neil Hunn: Yeah. I would say for the 2027 sort of setup, first, it is super important that, we are just starting basically next week the planning process. So this is. We have to go through all the process with all 29 companies and understand the puts and takes and all the nuances. So we always have to caveat that. We would say it is generally a constructive setup. The recurring sort of revenue, sort of exit run rate's encouraging. Certainly, the velocity of the product development on the AI side is encouraging now. Caveat there is we have. We are now in the commercialization phase, and we got to track the bookings and adoption and consumption. that is sort of where we are in that. I am sure there will be questions on that today's call. And then if you sort of go segment by segment, Deltek has had a couple good quarters. As I mentioned, we are still in a wait and see. We wanna see that continue. And then the other thing about Deltek is it is the business is definitively turning more recurring, more SaaS so we have the overlap to perpetual. in that business. And then just a reminder, central reach, we get a full year of organic. In network, certainly what we are seeing at DAT is encouraging, but it is supply driven. So it would be more. It would be healthier if it was demand driven, but it is definitely a better setup coming into next year versus coming into this year at DAT. And then I remind you, Subsplash is fully organic for the full year And then to Neptune's really the to-be-determined. determined. And it has a wider range of outcomes. It had a wider range of outcomes this year that we anticipated that were experiencing. And so that is a to-be-determined. I will have to really sort of spend a lot of time with the management team and to understand the industry trends heading into next year. And then NDI, which has just been awesome for us this year, will be more normalized next year. So. But the setup is generally constructive. Thanks, guys.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question is from Brent Thill from Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Brent Thill: Hi. This is Ria on for Brent. Thank you for taking the question. On Deltec last quarter, you mentioned that you wanted to see a consistent conversion of the GovCon pipeline before being able to call this an inflection from V3. I am just curious, did this quarter give you And I recognize it is early, but maybe just to elaborate on that last question. How are you thinking about Deltek for 2027?

Laurence Neil Hunn: Yeah. I think it was a very good quarter for Deltek. What we are seeing thankfully, is that more customers are starting to move to the cloud, so the bookings were quite strong. That does not, you know, obviously materialize in revenue. Immediately like perpetual. it is a. it is an uncertain market. I think what Deltek's doing is. And we have mentioned this last quarter is, announce the end of support for the cost point on prem solution in the first quarter of 28. So that is creating a catalyst for them to go back to the base and start to do that migration. So, you know, despite a sort of uncertain market, they are sort of making growth happen. So we will see 1 more quarter before we get into next year, but momentum is good there.

Brent Thill: Got it. And then just curious on any incremental updates on the M&A environment since last quarter. I think you mentioned $436 million deployed towards bolt-ons, but I think I am wondering more so on the larger deal side of things what you are seeing. So any color you are able provide there would be helpful.

Laurence Neil Hunn: Yes. I would say, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, right, we look to next year with sort of cautious optimism Janet and her team continues to be very busy. I would say the pipeline tilts more proprietary and proactive outreaches than large-scale processes. So very bespoke We just had a couple weeks ago our second annual CEO conference where we had 20 or so target CEOs together for a day, day-and-a-half going through Roper and getting to know the businesses. So that was well attended very high quality targets at that business. At that at that summit. And it is. And we are cautiously optimistic. I mean, all the pressures that have been have been, you know, on the private equity firms for now going on 3 years continue to exist. LP credit, DPI pressure, and sort of just coming to grips with where public companies are valued. It takes. there is a little bit of. there is a lot of bit of psychology in that, and that psychology appears to be coming into reality. Got it. Thank you. Yep. You bet. Thanks for the questions.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question is from Brian Peterson from Raymond James. Your line is now open.

Brian Peterson: Thanks, guys, and congrats on-- Thanks, Brian, we lost you.

Operator: Maybe hit the star and 1 keys accidentally. Yeah. We will come back. Operator, if we come back to him, that would be great. Queue. Okay. Okay. Your next question is from Terry Tillman from Truist Securities. Your line is now open.

Terry Tillman: Yeah. Hey, Neil, Jason, Zack and the rest of the team. Thanks for taking my primary question and a follow-up. On Vertifor, I care a lot about the InsurTech space. I am curious, how is the you called out the ARR growth. How is that faring versus the overall app software growth? And then it is still the first question. it is a multiparter, the first 1. This idea of the value based credits, will that just take some time for that revenue stream to ramp? And then I had a follow-up on Deltek. Thank you.

Jason Conley: Yeah. I will take the value based credit 1; Jason can take first. Yeah, Terry. So they are in line with the segment in terms of ARR growth.

Laurence Neil Hunn: And on the value based credits, just to remind everybody, this is a these contracts are being structured as recurring. So they are. You. You are buying a fixed amount. Those are. Have to be consumed in a in a specific period of time as a result. They are they are revenue recognition treatment is recurring, not reoccurring. So it will look it will look and feel like subscription revenue. Now, obviously, it is very important for the Vertafore sort of if you will, for deployed teams, the customer support implementation teams to make sure there is wide scale adoption and utilization so you get the upgrades, the uplift, the addition sort of credit purchases, and the renewals. And that is where we are right now. it is where I think the Velocity platform was GA within the last 60 or 90 days. I mean, it is. The full GA release has been very recent. And we are in the early adoption phase.

Terry Tillman: it is good to know on recurring versus reoccurring. I am glad to ask that. In terms of Deltek, I do not know if this is kind of a change in tone here, but I forgot where you all last gave an update on the SaaS versus on prem for Deltek, but it sounds like maybe things are picking up So it is kind of the real takeaway that the life part of total revenue could be, like, an incremental headwind in 2025. But then you are gonna have right behind it this kind of acceleration in recurring. Just anything more you can on kind of what you are talking about here, because it sounds like maybe it is picking up steam.

Jason Conley: Yeah. And, you know, it is. I think the you can appreciate, Terry, the timing of getting to the cloud is a little harder because it is a different value prop. So there is you know, that is that is sort of what we are managing through. But, certainly, it is our biggest maintenance base, at Roper. And so the timing of getting that to the cloud certainly would outstrip perpetual. it is just kind of how that phases over the next few years is a question. So. But we do feel good about the momentum. As we sit here today.

Operator: Alright. Thank you. Your next question is from Brian Peterson from Raymond James. Your line is now open.

Brian Peterson: Thanks, guys. Can you hear me? Hopefully, I am coming in okay. All right. Sorry about that. Oh, well, hey. I just wanted to ask on the appetite for AI and the adoption curve. I am curious what products have you seen that ramp a little bit faster than expected? And also just on the customer appetite and the packaging, has that been any challenges, or is it more about change management? Just kinda curious with customer appetite is at this point.

Laurence Neil Hunn: So the I will try to be comprehensive in my answer if I do not-- I can certainly take this offline as well. So let me just. We will follow the bouncing ball of this. So it is really a year ago, the models the capability of AI, we really could do agentic work. So the first question is, can we think of the ideas, the customer magic, if you will, sort of put into the product stack? That question is absolutely, without question, yes. Think it is 17 or 18 of the 21 software businesses have AgenTic solutions in the market. So that is the first question. So first, can we think of the idea? The second 1, can we build it? that is-- So that. that is yes. And that is led us to where we have the majority. The vast majority of companies having these products in the market. Now the question is, can we drive early adoption, convert sort of, if you will, the beta customers to early adopters? The answer to that has been yes. You know, just go back to the remarks I said in the call about strata and then FDI or last quarter with SoftWriters with pharmacy automation. The answer to that has been yes. Now that. Now it is about can we get-- we need to get to broad scale, you know, across, you know, into the go-to-market to market teams across all these businesses and get a broadly distributed into our customer bases and drive adoption. The customer interest has been very, very positive. Probably the most positive I have seen in my current tech because we are literally delivering a button that does magic things. So that is the good part. Now what we are. What I think all companies and we are not we are not alone in this is now you are facing budget cycles, AI committees, you know, all the safeguards and governance of data. And so we are just going the go to market processes. You know, the early indications are positive, but we have said this year, was going to be largely a year of commercialization learnings and adaptations. And, again, progressing well, but we have. it is still-- still to be proven. And then I think the first part of the question, where are some of the better customer reaction? Certainly, Century, certainly, Adderant, certainly SoftWriters and Pharmacy Automation, the early adopters that at Vertifore, the early adopters at Strata. I mean, there is really not I am just going through the list in my mind. there is not really been really, a flat launch. I mean, it is. Again, it is early days, and we will not bat a thousand. Across all these products, across all the companies, but we have not had any abject out of the box failures, if you will. I think 1 of the you know, interest. Changes with AI, obviously, is when you launch a product, you can iterate continue to iterate. So you will have some immediate customer feedback. So we have seen sometimes when something was not quite right, but then we have been able to iterate quickly based on feedback from the customer. So that. that is that is been helpful. Yep.

Brian Peterson: I appreciate the color, guys. Maybe just 1 added element there. As we are thinking about use of kind of frontier models, versus some of the lighter weight models, How are you guys thinking about that balance? And does that change any views on how we are thinking about AI oriented margins over the near to medium term?

Laurence Neil Hunn: Yeah, the punch line is our gross margins on these agentic tools are very positive. Sort of at our software gross margins. Our philosophy on this at the moment, and this is obviously subject to change, and this is well informed by our leadership team and our and our central accelerator, AI accelerator team, is we are 100% optimizing speed of development and deployment. And so we are working with a lot of the models that are on the frontier. We do not need the most frontier model. Be very clear about that. We do not need, you know, 5, 6 Astra or Fable 5.1 or 2 or whatever the current release is. But we are used sort of the cheaper sort of downscaled models the Frontier. But the harnesses that come with them, you can just get moving much faster. On the product side. Now, over time, every 1 of the products, 100% of the products have the model routers, and so we can sort of. We have multiple sort of models underneath each product in case when you call Anthropica or OpenAI, if they are not answering the phone and the latency you need, you immediately flip over to the other model. That architecture allows us to switch the models either into small language or open source models over time to manage the cost. But right now, we are optimizing for speed of development. Great. Thank you. You bet.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question is from Faith Briner from William Blair. Your line is now open.

Faith Brunner: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions and congrats on the quarter. Maybe to pull on a prior thread you talked about, you are seeing that encouraging, engaging around adoption, and now the focus is scaling that. So as you kind of work through the early process of that, what have you learned? What challenges are still there? And how are you kind of adjusting your go to market strategy to address these new challenges? And how do we get to a more clear monetization path, if that makes sense? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Laurence Neil Hunn: Yeah, I mean, this is-- Keep asking this question because. And we will just share our learnings as we go. The. I mean, obviously, we have had to figure out how to price all of these and not. there is not a 1 pricing size fits all. it is different per company and per-- I would say per product, but per company based on where customers are in the. In the existing economic relationships we have with our customers. So we generally-- we think we figured that out across the board. Then it is how do you how do you sell this in addition to versus in lieu of everything else that we are selling because there still is strong demand for, if you will, the legacy software stack. So how do we make sure this is on top of an addition to And then it is like. Like I said, like, in health care in particular, acute care hospitals have sort of an AI governance overlay. And that was a new learning from the Strata team, for instance. it is like it is going. It has a traditional sales cycle and then another layer of it. So it is not a it is not a barrier. it is just maybe it slows things down a little bit. And those are the sorts of things that we are learning right now.

Faith Brunner: Okay. That makes sense. And then maybe as we get more cautiously optimistic about m and a, how are you thinking about how AI changes your whole thought process on what makes an attractive target. So is there different growth considerations, different competitive that you now have to consider and how are you guys working through that?

Laurence Neil Hunn: For sure. So the first thing, and we have been doing this since over the last couple 3 years since AI, since the chat GPT moment, if you will. Need to certainly make sure and do the diligence that the end customer of the software company we are looking at is a viable long term customer. The customer is viable. So look at what we did, you know, last year. It was autism therapy, so people providing therapy to youth and then people going to church. So the end customer is highly viable and will not be sort of disintermediated by AI, if you will. Then it comes down to what we see in our portfolio. Do you have sort of the defensive mode and offensive moats to be a winner in the AI in the AI world. Right? So do you have-- Do you have sort of the right amount of data, the data rights, proprietary nature of data? Do you have network effects? Do you have sort of configuration lock in? So all-- and etcetera. I will not go through the full framework here. So then you have the preconditions to be successful in AI. that is where we are now. Fast forward, a year or 2 or 3 from now, it becomes, I think, the discernment becomes even easier because you will have taken targets while taking those advantages and will either have proven or not proven they are winning in the AI to be able to develop products, bring it to the market, monetize the products, drive additional customer value. And so the company that we are looking at now are in the early. Or the earlier stages of that. Okay. Awesome. Very helpful. Thanks, guys. You bet.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question is from George Kurosawa from Citi. Your line is now open.

George Kurosawa: Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. Couple of quick ones for me. It looks like buyback activity was paused in the quarter. I think it is something you would kind of messaged you were doing as you are preparing for the M&A environment to potentially warm up. Just maybe how you are thinking about buybacks going forward?

Jason Conley: Thanks, George. I think it is the same as we have always talked about, which is the relative sort of risk adjusted returns for us. And for us, the buyback is attractive, but the option value on the m and a, given all the dynamics we have talked about in GE and that everybody really knows about is worth, is worth the deleverage and to our balance sheet for that event. Now if, you know, we fast forward a couple quarters from now, we still have that option available to us. We still have quite a bit on the authorization. So that is. it is still a viable alternative if, you know, M&A market does not cooperate.

George Kurosawa: Okay. Great color. And you referenced on the free cash flow side, some impact from collections timing, the ERP implementation at Illumia Maybe if you could quantify the magnitude of that and then ERP implementations have a habit of maybe extending beyond initial timelines. Is that ERP is that are those collections issues now addressed? Or is there any potential that could extend into Q4?

Jason Conley: Yeah. Certainly, a lot of focus by the team there, and I know they are gonna do a great job. Just powering through some order to cash, challenges. They actually went live in January, but the big renewal season is in, you know, summer and fall. So we expect to see some improvement in the fourth quarter. Some of that might spill into the first quarter of next year. But, you know, when you kind of take a step back for the year, you know, we expect free cash flow per share to be in line with DEPS growth. Maybe even a little bit better. We will see how it plays out. So that should all sort of normalize as we as we close out the year. Got it. Thanks for taking the questions. You bet. Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question is from Daniel Jester from BMO Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Daniel Jester: Hey, good morning, and thank you for taking my question. So I wanted to make sure I caught this right but I think it is said earlier in the call that a majority of your businesses now have an AI solution in the market. I guess given the sort of urgency and the sort of moment in time that we are in, and the past comments you have made about the ability to sort of speed your development, I guess, what is the timeline to get to 100%? In terms of your businesses and software having an AI tool And are there any sort of commonalities in terms of limiting factors to get there?

Laurence Neil Hunn: Yeah, appreciate the question. So yeah, when you look at the portfolio, sort of there is basically, you know, 3 companies that do not have an AI tool. 1 is not a true software company. it is a group purchasing organization So they do not really have, like, an agentic software front. that is reports. MHA is reported in the network segment. They are using all sorts of AI inside the business to drive productivity, but. So that 1 set that aside. You have 2 businesses that are in clinical diagnostics, DI and Clinisys. They have early AI tools, but this is a what laboratory software does and this sort of this remit is it is a nearly fully solved technical problem. there is not like this is how you run laboratories and route samples to analyzers and results off analyzers and report that. And so it is basically an already fully automated process so there is not a large agentic you know, remit to do here. Now they are adding some AI tools around it, but it is not like-- These processes are already fully automated. So essentially, a long winded way of saying, the companies that have AI remit, 100% of those companies have AI tools today.

Daniel Jester: that is super helpful, and thank you for the color. And then I guess I will I will pull on the AI monetization thread as well for my for my follow-up. I guess as you think about next year, I guess, how diverse across the portfolio do you think that monetization will be? Do you think that some parts of the business are going to have 1 type of way of monetization and other parts of the business a very different 1. I guess maybe at a at an enterprise level, how should we be thinking about monetization? And, you know, maybe any color you can provide on the diversity of which parts of the business maybe will come sooner. Which parts maybe will be coming a little bit later? Thank you.

Laurence Neil Hunn: Happy to do it. Alright. So on the diversity of pricing models in AI, it comes in 3 general flavors. The first flavor we already talked about, I will call it like this. This tokenized fixed budget, use it over a period of time where you take it as recurring. That appears to be the predominant, the majority of what vertifor, Aderant, CentralReach, I mean, that. that is the predominant chunk, maybe less centuries, but that is the predominant way that our companies are going to monetize early. So it is consumption based thing, but you buy a fixed amount of consumption. it is usually lose it as you consume that, you buy additional sort of chunks. there is an. The other model is straight consumption. it is it is a minority of what we are doing, but we have straight consumption. It where our customers already buy from us largely on a consumption basis. So pharmacy automation, a lot of the tools already paid on a per script basis. We monetize on a per script basis with AI tools there. Or at DAT, we monetize what we do at, Convoy and DAT on a per load basis. So AI there will be on a per load basis. The 3rd way is gonna. Is this is, like, for example, at Deltek where their software remit is ERP for government contractors. And so how do you automate, like, the accounting close is 1 of the 1 of the product-- 1 of the product features they are delivering right now. that is gonna be basically delivered in the cloud as an add on. So you are gonna see if you will accelerated move from ground to cloud at a higher price point once you get to the cloud. So those are the 3 models. To your point about which ones will show up first, I think it will sort of go in sort of the first 2 models, the consumption, if you will. Terry. The subscription model where you have consumption and in that, and the straight consumption, those will be the ones that show up earlier And then and then the lift and shift to the cloud will take a little bit more time. Would anticipate anything. Okay. Great. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question is from Ken Wong from Oppenheimer. Your line is now open.

Ken Wong: Great. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to circle back to TEP growth. Up. You know, decel from the double digit that you guys reported this quarter, much of that is divestiture? How much of that is you guys, I think, had called out some Neptune softness. Any color you can provide there?

Jason Conley: Yeah. Hey, Ken. So second half, you know, we said it was gonna be high single digits. It ended up being a little bit higher in the third quarter. And so that did play out. And so we have got mid singles for the fourth. I would just say broadly, it has been the Neptune softness, and that is it is really a market sort of dynamic, and it is specifically for us, you know, volume growth is okay, but we actually had more mechanical meters, which has a lower ASP and lower margin. So that was, you know, sort of the sort of the driver of the second half. And we did not have. You know, our divestiture. We did divest the industrial businesses a few years ago, and we are getting the proceeds from that, but there is no sort of near term divestiture activity in that segment.

Ken Wong: Okay. Perfect. And then on the EPS guide, or DEPS guide, any impact from the bolt-ons that you guys, just picked up?

Jason Conley: No. I mean, the impact for us will be more next year. The current quarter, it is actually a little bit dilutive as we. You know, we have got some synergies that will that will roll through next year. it is actually. You know, for the fourth quarter, it is a little bit dilutive. Few pennies.

Ken Wong: Okay. Perfect. Thanks a lot, guys.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question is from Joshua Tilton from Wolfe Research. Line is now open.

Josh Tilton: Hey, guys. Thanks for, thanks for sneaking me in here. Maybe for my for my first question, I feel like there is been, like, a lot of you know, hypotheticals and what ifs and how do we see the path of adoption play out around you know, AI and just the monetization framework and I understand why everyone's asking the question, but unless I misunderstood, I thought you guys called out in the prepared remarks the you are seeing monetization from AI today. So I would kind of like to focus on that comment. Like, where are you seeing the monetization today? How are you seeing it? And if we are already seeing it in some places today, like, is that where we should expect it to be the most meaningful next year?

Laurence Neil Hunn: Yeah. Appreciate the question, Joshua. So. Yeah, I mean, this is-- I think the question is more on the how do we scale this, and, obviously, it is new, not just for us, but for the economy at large. And so we are all trying to figure that out. Where we are where we are seeing early AI sort of monetization is where the product stacks were first to market, so CentralReach. For instance, CentralReach, I will have Jason to make sure I sort of keep me honest here. But 75% of their bookings are either AI related AI specific, or AI related bookings.

Jason Conley: Yeah. In that range, for instance.

Laurence Neil Hunn: Aderant, the number is like 25% of their bookings are either AI or AI related. The anticipation for what is now back behind it, sort of the. They were I do not know, a year ahead of the of the portfolio. Now the portfolio is catching up. 25% to 75% is a wide range, but, you know, it would be nice to see that as we sort of scale across, you know, a dozen of our companies. But too early to say, is it gonna be 10%, 25%, 50% of bookings over time are gonna be AI or AI-related? Fast-forward 3 or 4 years, like, everything's AI. Like, this whole thing, what is AI? what is not AI, it is gonna be indistinguishable. So I think we are in a moment in time in there, Kurt.

Josh Tilton: Makes sense. And then maybe just my follow-up, Neptune sounds-- and, again, I could be a little bit wrong here, but it sounds like, you know, second half is a little bit less favorable. there is a mixed dynamic. We believe in this view of moving to the ultrasonic meters over time, better pricing. I understand all that. I guess, was the mix dynamic unexpected? And I ask it in the sense that is there a correction that can be made into next year where we can go back to maybe you know, a better than expected Neptune outcome after we saw what happened this quarter we step back, we make an adjustment, and we go back to being a little bit better? Or do you expect kind of you know, whatever you are seeing pressure the business today sort of last beyond this quarter, maybe into next year.

Jason Conley: Yeah. I appreciate the question. I mean, I think it is the static pipeline from Neptune, you know, customer by customer is strong. So there is definitely a market demand for it. This just. We just had pushes on the pipeline. So we do think coming into next year, it is gonna be more favorable for us. Timing is gonna be uncertain in terms of kind of the quarterly cadence. But, yeah, that secular demand is there. So, you know, we feel good about that.

Josh Tilton: Makes sense. Thank you, guys.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question is from Brent Bracelin from Mizuho. Your line is now open.

Analyst: Hey. How are you doing, guys? Ryan on for Great. Thanks for taking my question. Yeah. I wanted to just get a little bit more color on Neptune. Maybe just help us understand the market conditions, the main puts and takes that you guys are watching and then, you know, maybe kind of how you expect the mix dynamic to play out over the coming quarters? Thanks.

Laurence Neil Hunn: Yeah. I will take a. I will take another crack at this. The. So just remind everybody, the macro, what is happening in the water meter North American water meter end market. Just set that first, then we will get into, the specific quarter and our best look at the outlook. So what is happening is during COVID, you know, especially in the Northeast where the water meters in people's basements they cannot be sort of maintained or replaced. So then post COVID 22, 23, there was a surge there is a catch up. On the backside of this, you know, last year. This year, for sure, we are having to sort of comp over that surge. And so there is a in the in the industry, there are fewer meters that are being installed last year and this year versus the years before. You are kinda going from peak to trough. Is not like a macroeconomic cycle. it is still like a COVID super cycle dynamic that they industry at large is digesting. Talked about that in the past, but just sort of level set the. You and the team and everybody on that. So inside silver just sort of on the. We believe we are on the tail end of that sort of reset getting more of a normalized sort of meter market. Now what is also happened inside of that is this mix from mechanical to static. Static meters are. Is a better technology. They last longer. They perfectly measure. They perfectly measure the flow of water over the life of the meter where mechanical degrades slowly over time, so it is a better value proposition to the customer. that is why the market is generally going there. Because it is higher value, it carries a higher price, and so you have had this positive mix that is happened in the industry, in at Neptune, that is helped offset some of the meter declines, macro meter declines in the market. In the quarter, as Jason just said, there are projects, large projects that static meter projects that pushed, which had this. The total number of meters that Neptune sold in the quarter was actually pretty close to the expectation, but it was a dramatic mix towards mechanical. Had both a revenue implication and a margin implication. And as you just said, that likely sort of has a chance. Probability that normalizes in the next year, that is sort of the setup of the mix dynamic, both through the macro and the mix dynamic. We believe over the long arcs-- you know, I am not this is not a call for next year, it is like this is has been over our ownership, like a mid single digit growth business. And we think those dynamics are intact over the long arc. Awesome. Super helpful. Thank you, guys.

Operator: Shane you. This concludes our question and answer session. I will now hand the call back to Zack Moxcey for any closing remarks.

Zack Moxcey: Thanks, everyone, for joining us today, and we look forward to speaking with you during our next earnings call. Thank you.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.