Spok Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
October 30, 2024

There are 8 speakers on the call.

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the Spok Holdings Inc. Q3 20 24 Earnings Results Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Al Galgano.

Operator

Thank you. You may begin.

Speaker 1

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Spok Holdings' 3rd quarter 2024 earnings call. I am joined by Vince Kelly, Chief Executive Officer Mike Wallace, President of Spok Inc. And Chief Operating Officer and Calvin Rice, Chief Financial Officer. 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 include estimates of revenue, expenses and income as well as other predictive statements or plans, which are dependent upon future events or conditions.

Speaker 1

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 upon 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 the business environment, which are contained in our Q3 2024 Form 10 Q 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.

Speaker 1

With that, I'll turn the call over to Vince.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Al, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our Q3 2024 earnings call. I'm proud of the performance that our team was able to deliver in the Q3 as we continue to serve our customers at a high level and position Spok for strong performance in the Q4 and throughout 2025. We continue to make progress across the organization and believe that our strong operating platform and professional sales organization will result in solid full year software bookings growth. As we have previously stated, we expect to achieve low double digit year over year software bookings growth for the full year.

Speaker 2

Contributing to our strong level of software operations bookings in Q3 were 20 four six figure customer contracts, double the amount generated in the prior quarter. Further, we are positioned strongly for 2025. We have amazing relationships with the top healthcare systems in the nation who continue to purchase from us on a regular basis. We continue to invest in and enhance our platforms consistent with what our customers are requesting and Spok's products and services are viewed as an indispensable utility by our customers, leading to strong customer loyalty. Let me also take this opportunity right upfront to remind everyone that our mission remains solidly unchanged.

Speaker 2

That is to generate cash and return capital to our shareholders over the long term, while responsibly investing in and growing our business. That is our primary focus. Returning capital to shareholders is our legacy. We feel good about executing the strategy we believe in and one where we have enjoyed a lot of historical success. Today, we will share with you an update on how our strategic business plan is progressing in support of this goal, as well as our financial results for the quarter.

Speaker 2

I'll start by reviewing the agenda for today's call and the order will be as follows. Number 1, I'll provide a review of our company performance for the quarter. Number 2, Michael Wallace, our President and Chief Operating Officer will review quarterly sales and operational highlights. Number 3, Calvin Rice, our Chief Financial Officer will review our Q3 financial highlights and financial guidance for 2024. And number 4, I'll come back and wrap up the call and open it up for your questions.

Speaker 2

Again, as I said upfront, we're proud of what the Spok team has been able to accomplish in the Q3 and we believe we're positioned for a strong Q4. 3rd quarter highlights included a nearly 65% year over year growth in software operations bookings compared to Q3 last year, an increase in software backlog to $63,600,000 up more than 19% from the prior year quarter. Continued pipeline growth in terms of both size and quality, continued strength in our professional services business with year over year growth of 26%, continued strong levels of adjusted EBITDA, which covered our quarterly dividend and capital expenditure requirements, a resulting increase in cash balances, which grew approximately $4,000,000 during the quarter and will continue to build through the remainder of the year. And lastly, continued expansion of our wireless average revenue per unit further reflecting the impact of prior pricing actions and sales of our encrypted HIPAA compliant, alphanumeric Gen A pager. In short, we were very pleased with our performance in the Q3 and believe that our results in the 1st 9 months of the year provide a strong foundation for a solid Q4 and 2025.

Speaker 2

Kam will review the specifics later, but based on our most recent forecast, we are reiterating our previous guidance range for 2024. In the Q3 of 2024, we generated over $7,500,000 of adjusted EBITDA, which more than covered the $6,300,000 we returned to our stockholders. However, at the same time, we increased our Q3 research and development investment by nearly $300,000 or 10.5 percent on a year over year basis. And we believe we're on track to invest approximately $11,500,000 in product research and development expenses in 2024. That represents an investment in our future and upside for solutions sales momentum.

Speaker 2

As I mentioned, Spok has a proud legacy of creating stockholder value through free cash flow generation and we intend to continue this track record. In fact, over the last 20 years Spok has returned a total of more than $690,000,000 to our stockholders either through our regular quarterly dividend, special dividends or share repurchases. Our focus on maximizing cash over the long term supports the 4 major tenants of our strategy. Those are: number 1, continued investment in our wireless and software solutions number 2, growing our revenue base number 3, continued disciplined expense management and number 4, a stockholder friendly capital allocation plan. Going forward, we believe our extensive experience selling and operating our established communication solutions and world class customer base will create significant value for stockholders.

Speaker 2

Before I turn the call over to Mike, let me take a moment to review what I believe gives Spok its competitive advantage. As you can see from the chart today, Spok commands a strong competitive position and there are many metrics that point to the strength of our platform. There are multiple factors that have contributed to Spok's industry leading reputation and best in class product offering. I'd like to take a few moments to review some of our key recent accomplishments in product research and development. We believe our work here will fuel future software revenue growth and that our extensive experience selling and operating our established communication solutions will create significant value for stockholders by maximizing revenue and cash flow generation.

Speaker 2

Our product and development teams have been hard at work executing our product roadmap deliverables. For example, we recently completed and made available upgrades and a new UI to our operator consoles which hospitals use to efficiently process and route calls. We also launched Spok Care Connect contact center for universal interoperability. During the Q4, we intend to number 1, deploy upgrades to our Spok Care Connect enterprise reporting number 2, provide enhanced dashboard services for clinical and operational alerting Number 3, expand softphone support and SMS two way service improvements. And number 4, expand HL7 standards to support a wider variety of alerting systems.

Speaker 2

We look forward to future growth opportunities as a result of this work. Earlier this month, we hosted our Connect 24 users conference. This year, we had 233 customers registered for the virtual event. Our conference at the conference, we were able to showcase our product roadmap on our recent research and development efforts. Customer feedback was very positive and we look forward to the growth opportunities this conference created for 2025 and beyond.

Speaker 2

With that, I'll turn the call over to Mike.

Speaker 3

Thanks Vince and thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon. As Vince pointed out, it was a strong quarter and we made tremendous progress in a number of key areas. And as we say each quarter, while we continue to progress in building a solid financial platform and shareholder friendly capital allocation strategy, we remain true to our mission of being a global leader in healthcare communications. At the end of the day, our mission is to deliver clinical information to care teams when and where it matters most to improve patient outcomes as Spok enables smarter, faster clinical communications for our customers. One of our great assets is our over 2,200 healthcare facilities as customers, representing the who's who of hospitals in the United States.

Speaker 3

We have built our solutions over many years and have cultivated these long standing valuable customer relationships. This is coupled with the financial strength that more than 80% of our revenue is reoccurring in nature and we are a company with no debt, which provides us significant flexibility. In the Q3, our $10,400,000 of software operations bookings included 20 4 6 figure contracts, doubling our 2nd quarter performance for that metric and sustaining the momentum that we saw last year. Additionally, 16 of the customer contracts we signed this quarter were multiyear engagements. Now let me take a few minutes to highlight a few of the customer engagements that we signed in the Q3.

Speaker 3

The first is with a large and prestigious Northeastern health system that Spok has partnered with for over 20 years. The organization operates 14 hospitals with almost 40,000 employees. This is the initial phase of a longer term vision standardizing 5 disparate Spok Care Connect instances onto Spok SmartSuite for Phase 1. In addition to an upgrade of the core platform, the project includes additional SmartSuite console test licenses, value added services to ensure successful transitions for those facilities not using SmartConsole, along with addressing various technical initiatives and requirements of this customer. When Phase 1 is completed, this standardized enterprise system will allow each location to maintain current individual facility specific workflows.

Speaker 3

Future phases include expansion to other hospitals not using Spok software, so they too can use Spok for their patient care endeavors. The second contract is with a health system that has been with Spok for over 24 years. This East Coast academic health system operates across 7 hospitals with a workforce exceeding 15,000 employees. They own the Spok Care Connect platform unlimited enterprise licenses to initiate nearly 400,000 codes annually, dispatching approximately 1,000,000 messages or pages and oversee nearly 650 on call groups per year. This is our 2nd multi year engagement with them, which includes Spoke SmartSuite console licenses and upgrades, Spoke eNoteify, Spoke Messenger and Spoke Mobile usage for the organization's 6,500 licenses.

Speaker 3

As an existing Spoke customer, they also opted for 3 value added services, data integrity, solution assessment and workflow analysis, which will help our partner derive maximum value from their Spoke solutions. Lastly, in the quarter, we secured another outstanding multiyear engagement with a customer that's the 3rd largest non profit integrated health system in the United States. They have a footprint across 6 states in the Southeast U. S. And upper Midwest.

Speaker 3

They are committed to improving affordability and access to quality care. This multiyear engagement was focused on enhancing their consolidated Spok Care Connect platform that currently supports 21 hospitals across Illinois and Wisconsin. The Spok system is relied on for all switchboard operations, including the initiation of codes and emergency procedures. Our system is also leveraged as the enterprise directory with access to on call schedules. As an existing Spok customer, this project will introduce modernization to the user interface, enhanced architecture and continued support of the PBX strategy and roadmap.

Speaker 3

On a final note, I'd like to give recognition to our wireless team and their ability to quickly jump into action to mitigate the impact of the recent hurricanes Helene and Milton. The storms heavily impacted Florida's coastlines as well as into Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina as it relates to Hurricane Helene. A number of our transmitters were down and our team of techs quickly mobilized into action. Our team was able to get transmitters impacted from the storm quickly back online and we experienced minimal customer escalations. It is the responsiveness and customer support that our team demonstrates every day that has gained us the industry leading reputation that Vince spoke about and makes our wireless business such an incredible franchise.

Speaker 3

I'd like to thank our team for their efforts and dedication to creating strong customer loyalty for Spok. I will now turn the call over to Calvin Rice, our Chief Financial Officer, to briefly review the Q3 financial performance.

Speaker 4

Calvin? Thanks, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone. I would now like to take a few minutes and provide a recap of our Q3 2024 financial performance, which we reported today. I encourage you to review our 10 Q when filed as it includes significantly more information about our business operations and financial performance than we will cover on this call. Turning to our income statement.

Speaker 4

In the Q3 of 2024, GAAP net income totaled $3,700,000 or $0.18 per diluted share compared to net income of $4,500,000 or $0.22 per diluted share in the Q3 of 2023. In the Q3 of 2024, total GAAP revenue was $34,900,000 compared to total revenue of $35,400,000 in the prior year period. Revenue for the quarter consisted of wireless revenue of $18,300,000 and software revenue of $16,600,000 compared to $19,000,000 $16,500,000 in the prior year respectively. With respect to wireless revenue, we did see a bump in quarterly net unit churn. Unit churn can be lumpy from 1 quarter to the next, so we don't place a significant emphasis on what happens in a single quarter.

Speaker 4

There were several large contracts we had anticipated this quarter that moved into the Q4 from a timing perspective. Had we brought those in, net churn rate would have been much lower and we still expect to lock those down by end of the year. With that said, 3rd quarter churn was slightly higher than anticipated. We now expect full year churn to range from 4.5% to 6%, slightly behind the 4.4% to 5% we had previously mentioned and still within the rates we have seen in the last several years. RARPU increased $0.36 or 4.7% from the prior year, primarily driven by the continued impact of pricing actions undertaken in late 2023 and again in 2024.

Speaker 4

While we believe the demand for our wireless services will continue to decline on a secular basis as reflected in declining pager units in service, we are hopeful that our focus on pricing and new product offerings will continue to further offset revenue loss through pager unit decline. Turning to 3rd quarter software revenue. Professional services revenue of $4,800,000 was up 26.1% from the prior year period, reflecting the sharp increase in software operations bookings as previously discussed. We have also seen managed services perform very well. For the quarter, managed services comprised roughly 20% of our professional services revenue and grew by almost 133% from the prior year period.

Speaker 4

As I had mentioned previously, we are excited about the prospects of this growing service offering. As you may remember, this is a service offering within our professional services that is typically bundled with maintenance and sold like a subscription renewal. While managed services are likely to be cost prohibitive to our smaller customers, they have been well received by our medium and large customers who desire more predictability in their annual budgeting and throughout the upgrade life cycle process. We believe that over time this business will generate higher margins in relation to our traditional fixed bid engagements. Beyond this, it also provides us with a more predictable and measurable revenue stream.

Speaker 4

License and hardware revenue totaled $2,400,000 in the Q3 of 2024 compared to $3,200,000 in the same period of 2023. And finally, 3rd quarter maintenance revenue of $9,300,000 was essentially flat to the prior year. Adjusted operating expenses, which excludes depreciation, accretion and severance and restructuring costs totaled $28,500,000 for the Q3 compared to $27,900,000 in the prior year period. Year over year cost of revenue increased primarily due to the aforementioned increase in professional service bookings and the related hiring to support those services. Research and development costs continue to remain higher to support the ongoing investment in our product platform as we had previously discussed and remain on target to finish the year at approximately $11,500,000 as we have previously mentioned.

Speaker 4

General and administrative costs were slightly from one time items vary from 1 quarter to the next. These were partly offset by lower costs in technology operations as we continue to manage those costs in relation to our declining wireless revenues. Adjusted EBITDA in the 3rd quarter totaled $7,500,000 as compared to $8,400,000 in the prior year period, yet up $500,000 from the prior quarter. We were pleased with our Q3 results and believe our robust pipeline and the momentum that has been building over the course of 2024 has us positioned to end the year strong. More on financial guidance in a minute.

Speaker 4

We ended the Q3 with $27,800,000 in cash, which grew from $23,900,000 in the Q2. Based on our current outlook, we continue to anticipate annual free cash flow in the range of $25,000,000 to $27,000,000 and expect to exit 2024 with cash balances between $28,000,000 $30,000,000 On a final note, as you have probably already seen in today's press release, based on our performance in the 1st 9 months of the year and with the confidence in our Q4 performance, we are reiterating the guidance ranges for revenue and adjusted EBITDA for 2024. For the full year, we expect total revenue to range from $136,000,000 to $144,000,000 with wireless revenue ranging between $72,000,000 to $75,000,000 and software revenue ranging between $64,000,000 to 69,000,000 dollars Finally, we expect adjusted EBITDA to range from $27,500,000 to $32,500,000 With that said, I will now turn the call back over to Vince.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Calvin, and thank you, Mike. We believe we're strongly positioned to grow our franchise value while returning capital to our stockholders. We have a long term organic growth engine in our software solutions through Spok Care Connect where we continue to invest. We maintain a strong source of reoccurring revenue in our wireless service line. We run the largest paging offering in the world.

Speaker 2

It continues to function during natural disasters like hurricanes when other communications technology fails. Our customers appreciate that. We have integrated paging with our software operations. We have enhanced our paging platform and brought new modern secure user devices to market in order to serve our core healthcare customer base. We believe with these two assets going for us, we can continue to pay our recurring dividend for the foreseeable future and our best financial results are ahead of us.

Speaker 2

We appreciate your interest in Spok and we look forward to updating everyone again next quarter when we report our 4th quarter results and provide guidance for 2025 in late February. Thank you for joining us this morning and have a great day. Operator, you may now open the line up to questions.

Operator

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer The first question we have is from Kyle Bauser of B. Riley. Please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Hi, Vince, Mike and Calvin. Thank you for taking my questions and congrats on a really productive quarter here.

Speaker 1

Thank you.

Speaker 5

So on the software operations bookings side, really nice step up of 20 foursix figure contracts versus 2018 last quarter 2019 in Q1. Can you talk a little bit more about the makeup of these bookings? I know Mike talked about a few of these bigger contracts, which is great. More broadly, were they derived from existing clients, new hospitals? You talked about in the past about breaking out clients by number of beds, so like over under 200 or over 600.

Speaker 5

Just kind of curious if you could provide a little bit more color around some of these big contracts.

Speaker 2

Yes. Kyle, most of these contracts were larger customers that we have, existing customers that we have doing upgrades and those upgrades are buying the managed services along with that. Not a ton of new logo business this quarter, there was a couple. Obviously, it's going to be a big focus in 2025 as we bring some of our new software solutions to market. But it's basically similar to what you've seen in prior quarters.

Speaker 5

Got it. And you've also mentioned having about 26% market share in the U. S. At least. Can you talk about how you see your reach kind of expanding in the U.

Speaker 5

S. Across, I think you've talked about the 7,000 sites of care?

Speaker 3

Yes, Kyle, it's Mike. We've talked about this before. It's kind of bifurcated when you look at the large hospitals, so over 600 beds. We touch about 50% of those customers. Now not every one of those customers have all of our solutions.

Speaker 3

If you look and that's about 350 facilities out of the 7,000 or so in the United States, Kind of the mid tier, which is kind of 200 beds to 599 beds. Again, we touch about 30% of those customers, which again, they don't have necessarily all of our products. And then the small customers, which are under 200 beds, which is the overwhelming number as far as just a nominal number, it's like 5,500 out of the 7,000 or so. We've only got about 5% of that market at the end of the day. So as we've talked about before, we're heavily skewed towards the larger, more complex, over 600 bed hospitals in the United States.

Speaker 5

Got it. That makes sense. And maybe switching to ARPU. So it came up nicely even above Q1 levels. Can you talk about this a little bit more and maybe remind me what sort of steady state ARPU you're kind of targeting or maybe how you see this trending?

Speaker 5

Is there seasonality, etcetera?

Speaker 4

Yes, Kyle. Hey, this is Calvin. So from an ARPU perspective, to be quite frank, we're targeting as much as we can, obviously balancing the churn levels and being conscious of the macro environment and everything that our customers go through from that perspective. But really driving the ARPU function is it's going to be a function of the price increases by and large that we've spoken to for the last several years. And we did another one effective September 1.

Speaker 4

So you really only see about a month of that being reflected there this year and certainly for the quarter. And so that will continue to roll through in the Q4 and beyond. That's going to be the biggest driver. And then the Gen A pager is the other component that's really helping support that ARPU and comes in at about an average 2 to 2.50 more per units relative to kind of our standard unit. So as we kind of proliferate those units throughout the customer base, that will continue to increase and help out the ARPU function as well.

Speaker 4

So those are really the 2 kind of key components of ARPU and what's been driving that performance over the last several years. Okay. And maybe just a couple of quick ones, one on international and the other

Speaker 5

on October, which sounds like it's off to a good start. So on international, this is kind of a growth opportunity that you've talked about. Can you provide a little bit more color around maybe the size of this market and how we should think about the international contribution over the next 12 to 24 months?

Speaker 2

Yes. Most of our international effort is focused on the APAC region. I think Australia in particular, we partnered with a company called In Technology to penetrate that market. We're working very closely with them. We've gone to a number of trade shows with them, working with the National Health Service over there.

Speaker 2

So we have aspirations there for 2025. I don't think you'll see anything major happen in 2024, so in the balance of the year with that. But that's where our big focus is with respect to international.

Speaker 5

Okay. Thank you for that. And then lastly, you mentioned October being off to a great start. Anything you can point to like software bookings or other activity you're seeing would be great?

Speaker 2

It's off to a good start like most of our quarters. We're confident in our guidance. We're hunting a couple of wells out there. We hope to bring 1, maybe 2 of those in by year end. It's bigger deals, but it's always interesting the gates you have to get through in order to get them all signed off and inked, but we're going to get them.

Speaker 2

It's just a question of when. So stay tuned.

Speaker 5

Sounds good. Okay, excellent. Well, thank you for the update and really nice quarter guys.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Kyle.

Operator

The next question we have is from John Dickson as a Private Investor. Please go ahead.

Speaker 6

Hello, everyone. Can you hear me?

Speaker 2

We can.

Speaker 6

Awesome. I just have a quick question. So I've been with you kind of throughout all this restructuring process you've been going through. And I have a question about the Gen A pager and the pager churn. The decreases you're seeing in the pagers, what is that related to?

Speaker 6

If it's not being replaced by the Gen A pager, is it related to lower employee counts from the companies that you're with? Or is there another device that's taken the place in the communication system from the pager itself?

Speaker 2

Well, over the years, what we've seen, John, is that these paging customers in these large hospitals may have 5,000 pagers and then they go for 6 months and now it's 40,750 pagers. It's slowly going down. We're seeing about a 4%, 4.5%, 5% churn on an annual basis on the units. And what we're doing and we're working hard on this is we're trying to offset that with revenue based initiatives. So we call it average revenue per unit.

Speaker 2

1 is the Gen A pager, which gets a couple of bucks more per month per pager. The other is some technology that we're bringing to bear, and that we'll be focusing on in the Q1 of 2025 that kind of makes the pagers almost a two way type device when you combine them up with some applications that we have on the mobile device with the iPhone and the Androids. And the other thing is we've changed the compensation incentives for the wireless sales team to be revenue focused, not unit focused, so that they're really focused on maintaining revenue in those large accounts. And there's lots of ways they can do that. We've got a couple of options for them to get higher ARPU or kind of have a take or pay type contract.

Speaker 2

So we're focused on that as well because that impacts commission, their pocketbook and we found that's been a good driver of performance. So paging is not going to be a growth business, but it's still very much valued by these emergency service providers and healthcare. When the hurricane tore through Florida, most of the cellular telephone systems were down and our pacing systems were working just fine. I think out of our 60 or so transfers we had down there, we had 3 or 4 off the air at any given time. And since we simulcast, it really has no effect on the quality of the signal on the network.

Speaker 2

So, Paging is going to be around for a long time. It's not going to be a growth engine. Our software business is a growth engine. And fortunately, the software is growing at a faster rate than Paging is declining. So the company net net on a total basis is growing and we're very profitable while we do that.

Speaker 6

That sounds good, Vince. Thank you for that explanation. And then I just have one last question. Earlier in the year, you guys spoke about a cloud software solution that you were building out for the smaller hospitals. Can you kind of follow-up on that?

Speaker 6

How is that going?

Speaker 2

Yes. It's here now. It's available. I think we sold a ton of them. We sold about 5 of them.

Speaker 2

The smaller hospitals are still a little bit slow to adopt. And what we're finding is it's generally a resource type thing. You go in, you pitch it and it looks great, but they don't have anybody to work on the project and get it going. So we're going to continue helping them, continue working with them. What we don't want to do is go to a small hospital, small healthcare facility and end up with a big professional services engagement where we got to put staff there because A, they can't afford it and B, we'd lose money on that.

Speaker 2

We are very sensitive about our professional services group. It's been increasing its profitability every year under Mike's great leadership. And so we don't want to do things that don't make sense for us financially. So we're still learning to be totally blunt about it, about that smaller market and we expect to see improvements there in the coming year.

Speaker 6

Well, that sounds great, Vince. And that's all I got for you. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2

Thank you, John.

Operator

The next question we have is from George Melas of MJH Management. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Thank you. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. Quick question on the software operations booking. It seems to be higher but also more consistent.

Speaker 7

This year, Q1 was 8, then it was 9, now it's over 10. Help us understand not just the fact that it's grown, but the fact that it seems like it's more consistent.

Speaker 2

Yes. George, I think that's part coincidence because the thing about the software bookings is if you get like we got 2 big wells we got on the table right now, we're trying to bring in and land. If we get one of those, it skews it in a given quarter or sometimes you get 2 of them in 1 month and then that skews it. So it has been consistent. What I can tell you is we're very comfortable.

Speaker 2

We said we'd have double digit bookings growth this year. I think last year we did like $30,500,000 in software operations bookings. That's going to increase more than 10% for this year and we'll see something similar to that. We hope maybe better when we do our guidance at the end of February for 2025.

Speaker 7

Okay, great. Makes sense. And how does that flow through to maintenance? How long does it take to flow through maintenance? Because you've had this nice increase in bookings, but your maintenance, at least it's flat.

Speaker 7

It's not declining at all. I guess year over year, it's up a little bit, but it should flow relatively quickly, right, to maintenance?

Speaker 4

Yes, George. This is Calvin. From a maintenance flow through perspective, obviously, it depends on what mix of the operations booking is in total, but the maintenance starts flowing through immediately. But we obviously amortize that over the life of the contract. So when you're looking at it on a year to date basis, obviously, it's dependent upon when it was sold.

Speaker 4

There's a big difference if it was sold in January versus December, if you're comparing those from 1 year to the next. So give or take, I'd say about 6 to 12 months from the time it's booked, you're probably going to have an apples to apples comparison from 1 year to the next.

Speaker 7

Okay, great. And then just maybe a very broad question from a competitive perspective. Are you seeing any changes? Any are you strengthening your position now that you're really truly focused on your Care Connect suite?

Speaker 2

Yes. I think we're strengthening our position with respect to our traditional competition and our traditional competitor base, George. We've got when we kind of break out how we look at the business, we've got on call scheduling type competitors and we hold the on call schedule. We've got clinical alerting systems out there that we compete with and we do that well as well. And then you have the traditional care coordination and secure messaging competitors, not much has changed in that arena.

Speaker 2

The one place we are seeing some changes in the competitive landscape and I think it could be a great opportunity for us, we're hard down focused on this right now. There's a lot of the customer experience, UCaaS, CCaaS type large vendors out there, looking to replace incumbent PBX systems in hospitals. I think there's an opportunity to use our operator console with those systems going forward and put an AI front end on it from an operator standpoint. And I think we could have a really nice package there. So we're talking about partnering there.

Speaker 2

We're having these conversations now. So I think that's an opportunity for us.

Speaker 7

Okay. That's really interesting. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2

Thank you, George.

Operator

At this time, there are no further questions. And I would like to turn the floor back over to Vince Kelly for closing comments.

Speaker 2

Thank you all very much for your support. We look forward to speaking with you at the end of February when we release our Q4 results and issue our 2025 financial guidance. Everyone have a great evening.

Operator

This concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.

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