Progress Software Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
March 31, 2025
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Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Progress Software Corporation First Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I will now hand the conference over to your speaker host, Michael Michiquay, SVP of Investor Relations.

Operator

Please go ahead.

Michael Micciche
Michael Micciche
Senior Vice President, Investor Relations at Progress Software

Okay. Thank you, Olivia. Thanks for your help today. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for Progress Software's first fiscal quarter twenty twenty five financial results conference call. On the line with me this afternoon are Yogesh Gupta, President and Chief Executive Officer and Anthony Folger, our CFO.

Michael Micciche
Michael Micciche
Senior Vice President, Investor Relations at Progress Software

As always, we'll begin the call with our Safe Harbor statement. During this call, we will discuss our outlook for future financial and operating performance, corporate strategies, product plans, cost initiatives, the integration of ShareFile, which closed on 10/31/2024, and other information that might be considered forward looking. Such forward looking information represents Progress Software's outlook and guidance only as of today and is subject to risks and uncertainties. For a description of the risk factors that may affect our results, please refer to the Risk Factors sections in our filings with the SEC. Progress Software assumes no obligation to update the forward looking statements included in this call.

Michael Micciche
Michael Micciche
Senior Vice President, Investor Relations at Progress Software

Additionally, please note that all the financial figures referenced in this call are non GAAP unless otherwise indicated. You can find a reconciliation of our non GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP figures in our financial results press release, which was issued after the market closed today. This document contains additional information related to our financial results for for the first fiscal quarter of twenty twenty five and I recommend that you reference it for specific details. We've also provided a PowerPoint presentation that contains supplemental data for the first quarter and that slide deck provides highlights and additional financial metrics. Both the earnings release and the supplemental presentation are available on the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.progress.com under the Investor Events and Presentations tab.

Michael Micciche
Michael Micciche
Senior Vice President, Investor Relations at Progress Software

Today's call is being recorded in its entirety and will be available for replay on the Investor Relations section of our website shortly after we finish. And with all that out of the way, Yogesh, I'll turn it over to you.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

Thank you, Mike. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today as we announce the results from our first quarter of fiscal twenty twenty five. We're extremely pleased with our solid start to the year as you can see from the numbers and the updated guidance in our earnings release. Our annualized recurring revenue or ARR increased 48% over last year in constant currency, predominantly driven by share file with additional contribution from the rest of our business. And our net retention rate again surpassed 100%.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

For the quarter, revenues came in at the high end of our guidance at $238,000,000 up 30% in constant currency showing steady continuous demand for our solutions. Earnings per share of $1.31 significantly exceeded the upper end of the range we provided at the end of Q4, which illustrates that our whole team is executing well, while also keeping expenses in check. Our operating margins of 39% this quarter are indicative of our company wide focus on expense management and execution as well as faster ShareFile integration. So at a high level, our results show several positives and Anthony will take you through the details of the quarter later. Perhaps most important, the integration of ShareFile is going very well as you can see from its significant contribution to ARR, revenues as well as expense savings.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

Each of the milestones and key areas of integration we anticipated are either on track or ahead of plan. During the quarter, we paid down $30,000,000 on our revolver ahead of our original plan to start paying down debt in second quarter and in line with our intent to de lever rapidly so that we can be ready for the next deal. We remain very focused on prudent capital allocation and on using all facets of our capital allocation strategy to provide solid returns on invested capital. To that end, we also repurchased $30,000,000 of our stock consistent with our goal of returning capital directly to shareholders in the form of opportunistic buybacks. From a macro perspective, we have seen no disruption stemming from the uncertainty in the environment thus far, particularly as it pertains to our relatively modest federal government business.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

And we continue to monitor the developments closely. So all in, our first quarter of twenty twenty five was very solid across the board and our teams are once again showing their excellence in running the business efficiently while meeting and exceeding our operational targets. Let me now provide a little more detail on ShareFile and revisit a couple of highlights of the deal. We ended Q1 about four months into the integration and with everything proceeding as expected and probably a bit better in many ways. Our transition services agreement with CSG is working out well.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

While we still have more steps to complete, our progress has been faster than anticipated and we continue to believe that we can complete the integration and reach our 40% operating margin target for the acquired business by the end of this fiscal year. The People integration efforts with our ShareFile colleagues have gone extremely well as the collective teams have embraced our common culture and are moving forward as one. The hiring and integration of teams in locations such as India, Costa Rica and Bulgaria has been rapid and we're excited about the progress on the people front. As a reminder, ShareFile is a native SaaS platform with 100% recurring revenue and solid net retention rates. In addition to the robust durable revenues and cash flow that ShareFile will generate, we now have extensive expertise running a significant SaaS business at scale with excellent gross margins.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

Before we acquired ShareFile, our SaaS platforms only accounted for around 3% of our total revenues and now SaaS is nearly 30 of our revenue. In addition, the addition of ShareFile is helping us in a number of ways. For example, the strong cloud operations platform and significant cash flows from an optimized SaaS business opens up a larger segment of potential M and A candidates. Previously, we looked at many SaaS businesses and were hesitant because their gross margins and operational capabilities were unappealing to us. By the time we are ready to take on another deal, we will have cloud operational capability at scale as well as the additional strong cash flow and balance sheet to seriously consider deals we may have been hesitant about before.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

I'm incredibly excited about the possibilities, but I also want to make sure that we remain disciplined, focused and operationally competent in every regard when it comes to M and A and the execution of that part of our strategy. In fact, to further enable the execution of our strategy, we are also filing a universal shelf registration statement which allows us to which will allow us to access the capital markets with greater agility. While we currently do not have any plans to offer securities under the shelves, it does provide us with additional flexibility to carry out our total growth strategy. And we do see significant opportunities in the M and A market. There are an altitude of good companies and products that we believe will be coming to the market and continued higher interest rates have made us meaningfully more competitive for deals when competing against strategic and financial buyers.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

As I mentioned earlier, ShareFile gives us ready made SaaS experience and expertise and our reputation as the buyer of choice in infrastructure software positions us extremely well in the minds of company founders, management and investors. All of this creates a competitive differentiation for progress. Having a shelf ready to go adds to our advantages and will increase our ability to make acquisitions. Let me now highlight a few of our customer wins from the first quarter. Several leading commercial lenders and banks expanded the use of ShareFile in the first quarter.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

The wins highlight our financial service organizations are benefiting from purpose built AI capabilities in the ShareFile product to securely share large documents with their clients, detect when the client document contains sensitive information, verify recipients identity upon access and integrate e signature into their workflows. The customer feedback we continue to hear is that ShareFile is directly contributing to their revenue streams, workforce efficiency and risk mitigation. Also in Q1 to AI powered its content recommendations for their customers, one of the world's leading streaming entertainment providers turned to our data platform products for semantic analysis capabilities. Demonstrating our continued impact on shaping our customers' digital experiences, a global leader in industrial machinery manufacturing expanded its use of our DevTools products to provide touchscreen user experiences for the industrial machines to drive easier, accessible and more efficient workflows for operators. Two states in The U.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

S. Reaffirm their commitment to use Progress's Intelligent Decisioning product to automate policy driven decisions that are part of their digital government infrastructure. And we also saw several global financial, automotive and retail customers significantly expand the use of our DevOps products to optimize, secure and assure compliance of their application infrastructures. In addition, our infrastructure network management offerings grew strong new wins across Europe and Asia including one of India's newest airports. The common thread behind all these wins, expansions and renewals is our focus on enabling our customers to develop, deploy and manage verifiable and trustworthy AI powered applications and digital experiences.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

More and more of our customers are leveraging progress to deliver reliable outcomes from often massive unstructured datasets in ways that can dramatically improve work productivity, customer service and ultimately revenue, while increasing compliance and reducing risk. Let me provide a quick update on our AI efforts as it's a major force driving change in almost every industry. AI has been part of our strategy and product roadmap for many years and is core to the ongoing value we're providing our customers. Those of you who have tracked our company over the years would have seen our early assessment and focus on how data would be critical to delivering AI driven applications. Concept of AI has certainly come a long way since then.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

Today, as our customers continue to rely on progress to power and solve mission critical parts of their business, we have stayed ahead of this transformative technology evolution by ensuring our customers have the tools, processes and expertise to fully leverage AI's potential. Our AI efforts continue to be focused on three areas. Number one, help our customers build great agent taken AI powered applications and experiences that automate workflows and generate accurate, valid and verifiable answers that are in context relevant to the audience and leverage data in a secure and trustworthy manner. Number two, offer agentic and AI capabilities within our own products to make them much easier to use and to deliver greater value to the users. And three, use AI internally to be operationally more efficient, managing costs while investing in areas where we need to invest.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

To accelerate these efforts, one of our engineering leaders recently stepped up to spearhead our AI efforts across the company as Provis's Chief AI Officer. Ed Kiessling has been part of Provest's engine leadership for many years during which he has to help transform that organization and we knew the importance of pointing someone who can drive such transformation again. In this new role, which reports directly to me, Ed is helping us innovate and invest in AI while also maximizing cost efficiency benefits through AI. In many ways, these efforts are balancing each other out as we continue to focus on retaining, supporting and innovating for our customers. In summary, the first quarter of twenty twenty five was a great quarter financially and operationally.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

I want to thank all our employees for all of their hard work. We are delighted that we have such a strong employee base and the addition of ShareFile further strengthens our organization and culture. We expect to have ShareFile fully integrated by end of the fiscal year and we will continue to pay down our debt aggressively. At the same time, we're keeping our seat at the table in the M and A market and always looking for great acquisitions. We're also keeping our eyes on a larger global macro environment and remain confident that our customers trust progress to continue to deliver in an ever changing world.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

Thank you again for joining us this evening. And now let me pass it over to Anthony for more details around our results and the guidance.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

All right. Thanks Yogesh. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining our call. As Yogesh mentioned, we're very pleased with our Q1 results and especially with the pace of the ShareFile integration. I'll talk more about ShareFile later on, so let's begin with our results for the quarter.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

Starting on the top line, we closed Q1 with ARR of $836,000,000 representing 48% year over year growth and 3.4% pro form a growth on a year over year basis. For clarity, the pro form a results include ShareFile's ARR in both periods. Our growth in ARR was driven by multiple products, including ShareFile, but also OpenEdge, our DevTools products, Sitefinity, Kemp LoadMaster and What's Up Gold. We view this broad based growth across our product portfolio as a clear indicator of our effective execution and a steady demand environment. As a reminder, our calculation of ARR is presented in constant currency with all periods presented at our current year budgeted exchange rates.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

Consistent with past practice, we've updated ARR using our 2025 budgeted exchange rates and as a result, ARR that was reported in prior periods has changed slightly. The change isn't material and doesn't alter the trend in ARR growth or the net retention rates that we've been reporting over the past several quarters. We've included the details of this calculation in the supplemental financial presentation filed with our press release. Also worth highlighting is our strong net retention rate, which again came in at over 100% reflecting resiliency in our top line. As we've mentioned several times before, we believe that investments in our product portfolio and good customer relationship management both contribute to our consistently strong net retention rates.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

In addition to solid ARR growth and a net retention rate more than 100%, revenue for the quarter of $238,000,000 came in at the high end of our guidance range. On a year over year basis, revenue grew by 29% with growth driven by the acquisition of ShareFile, partially offset by the renewal timing of multiyear subscription contracts. As we've mentioned on previous earnings calls, the renewal timing of subscription contracts, especially multiyear subscriptions, can have a significant impact on our revenue in any given quarter skewing results higher or lower for that period and creating lumpiness in comparative periods. For this reason, we continue to focus on ARR as the best barometer of top line performance. Turning to expenses, total costs and operating expenses for the quarter were $144,000,000 up 34% from the prior year, but lower than expected.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

The primary reason our costs were better than expected is the quicker, more cost effective integration of ShareFile. Some of this efficiency that we've gained from the integration will benefit our cost base post integration. As a result, some of these costs have been factored into our outlook. It's also important to note that the year over year expense differential was solely due to the ShareFile acquisition. Without ShareFile, our costs and operating expenses would have slightly decreased on a year over year basis.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

Operating income was $94,000,000 up $17,000,000 compared to the prior year quarter. Our operating margin of 39% exceeded our expectations due to strong top line performance and good cost management. Likewise, on the bottom line, earnings per share of $1.31 for the quarter was $0.23 above the high end of our guidance range. Moving on to a few balance sheet and cash flow metrics, we ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $124,000,000 and total debt of $1,510,000,000 for a net debt position of $1,390,000,000 On a post synergy basis, we expect our net leverage ratio to be approximately 3.4 times. Our DSO for the quarter was forty eight days, an improvement of nineteen days compared to last quarter.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

Unlevered free cash flow was $88,000,000 for the quarter, an increase of $10,000,000 over the prior year quarter and was driven by stronger than expected collections and better operating performance during the quarter. Finally, because our operating performance and collections were meaningfully better than we expected, we were able to allocate more capital to debt repayment and share repurchases during the quarter. Specifically, during Q1, we paid down $30,000,000 against our revolving line of credit ahead of our expectation to begin de levering in Q2. Also, we repurchased $30,000,000 of progress stock at a lower price than anticipated and as a result, we've lowered our annual share repurchase forecast from $80,000,000 to $70,000,000 and we've shifted that $10,000,000 savings to our debt repayment plans and now expect to pay down a total of $160,000,000 against our revolving line of credit during 2025. At the end of Q1, our revolving line of credit has a balance of $700,000,000 and we have a $77,000,000 remaining under our current share repurchase authorization.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

Okay. Now I'd like to turn to our outlook for Q2 and the full year 2025. When considering our outlook for Q2, it's important to reiterate the point that I made earlier about the revenue impact of multi year contract renewals and how their timing can impact revenue in any given quarter. Despite this potential for lumpiness in quarterly revenue, we expect ARR to be a good reflection of our fundamental top line performance. And as mentioned on our last call, we expect low single digit ARR growth in 2025.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

With that, for the second quarter of twenty twenty five, we expect revenue between $235,000,000 and $241,000,000 and earnings per share of between $1.28 and $1.34 For the full year, we expect revenue between $958,000,000 and $970,000,000 consistent with our prior guidance. We expect an operating margin of approximately 38%, a slight increase from prior guidance. We're projecting adjusted free cash flow between $226,000,000 and $238,000,000 and we're projecting unlevered free cash flow between $283,000,000 and $294,000,000 both reflecting a slight increase from prior guidance. Finally, we're projecting earnings per share of between $5.25 and $5.37 an increase of $0.25 per share compared to our prior guidance. Our guidance for full year EPS assumes a tax rate of 20%, the repurchase of $70,000,000 in progress shares, total debt repayment of $160,000,000 and approximately 45,000,000 shares outstanding, including approximately 350,000 shares associated with potential dilution on our 2026 convertible notes.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

I'm sure you'll recall that we purchased a call spread on our 2026 convertible notes to hedge the economic impact of dilution up to approximately $89 per share. However, accounting regulations do not allow for recognition of any benefit from that call spread when calculating shares outstanding. Because of this added nuance, we'll continue to provide the number of shares that we've assumed for dilution each time we provide an outlook on earnings per share. For more details, I'd recommend that you refer to the supplemental financial presentation filed with our press release, which now includes more information on our outstanding debt. In closing, we are thrilled to deliver a great Q1 really across the board.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

We believe our integration of ShareFile along with accelerating our debt repayment positions us really well to continue to execute our total growth strategy for the remainder of this year and well beyond. With that, I'd like to open the call for Q and A.

Operator

Thank you. And our first question coming from the line of Fatima Belani with Citi. Your line is now open.

Fatima Boolani
Fatima Boolani
Managing Director, Co-Head US Software Equity Research at Citi

Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. Yogesh, I wanted to direct this one to you first. You gave us a good picture of the macro health and some of the commentary there. But if I were to ask you to double click on just the ShareFile business, we understand that of the 86,000 ish customers in that base, the vast majority I think you characterized as being SMB.

Fatima Boolani
Fatima Boolani
Managing Director, Co-Head US Software Equity Research at Citi

So I'm wondering if there are any observations that are worthwhile sharing from an SMB or mid sized company health behavior perspective, just kind of given the domestic policy whiplashing that's going on. Just any high level or broad commentary in terms of how some of these customers might be behaving in the cross section of this customer size? And then I have a follow-up for Anton, please.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

Thank you, Fatima. So, it's interesting, I'll give you of course our perspective, but I want to also process that by pointing out that share file is really the mission critical workflow management solution for the customers that use it. So I want to make sure people understand that what applies to it may or may not apply to other things that those businesses spend money on. So when you think about, for example, a legal business, a law firm, an accounting firm, a firm that is basically interacting with its doctor's office, small physician's office, you name it. When they are interacting with patients or pharmacies or clients, and trying to share securely their documents, making sure that there's document tracking, change management, versioning, compliance, regulatory compliance.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

These things are required and so we haven't really seen anything in the market to date. We are keeping a very close eye on what's going on. But so far, business has been very healthy. So Fatima, I wouldn't want to speak more broadly for other things, but at least for progress for ShareFile specifically, business continues to be very healthy.

Fatima Boolani
Fatima Boolani
Managing Director, Co-Head US Software Equity Research at Citi

I appreciate that. Anthony, for you, you guys reiterated, I guess the increased proclivity to look at more SaaS native assets as you think about your M and A strategy as part of the total growth strategy. And so when we think about gross margins and gross margins trajectory, how should that tactically play out for gross margins in the near term and then medium term as you onboard and scale more SaaS oriented assets? Thank you.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

Yes. Thanks Fatima. That's a good question. The ShareFile business when we acquired it had gross margin north of 80%, which we thought was outstanding, especially for sort of a document centric and SMB focused business. I would say they were in the low 80s, 82%, eighty three %.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

Opportunities that we had looked at previously, certainly especially subscale assets had gross margins at much lower levels than that. And we just hadn't we really didn't have the capability or the capacity to take those margins up in any meaningful way. To Yogesh's point, we now do have that competency internally. I would expect that anything we would buy, we'd look to get gross margins at least up to the share file level. And so I don't think that that has an enormously dilutive impact on our gross margin overall.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

Pure software is always going to be slightly higher margin, but we are very happy with low 80s on SaaS based products. And I think this opens up the opportunity set pretty broadly for us.

Fatima Boolani
Fatima Boolani
Managing Director, Co-Head US Software Equity Research at Citi

Thank you.

Operator

Thank

Operator

you. Our next question coming from the line of Sanjalambar with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

Pinjalim Bora
Pinjalim Bora
Executive Director at JP Morgan

Great. Thank you for taking the questions and congrats on the quarter. Staying on that same thread since you called out SaaS, should we expect basically progress to lean in on SaaS acquisitions? Obviously, it will provide you more visibility on kind of the revenue given the ratable rubric and all that. Are you kind of making a concerted effort towards adding more SaaS going forward?

Pinjalim Bora
Pinjalim Bora
Executive Director at JP Morgan

And should we expect that SaaS mix to be more than 50% of the business over time?

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

Well, Pendulum, thank you. It's actually interesting, right? As you know, usually we buy companies I like to say we don't buy unicorns, we buy thoroughbreds, right? And thoroughbreds means that the company has been around ten or fifteen years and really has built up a great customer base and has built up a reputation in the market. And when you start thinking now about companies that were started, let's say between 02/2010, the vast majority of them are SaaS.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

So I think the market opportunities that will come up by definition will be more SaaS, Pindu, right. So it isn't just that we would necessarily focus primarily on SaaS. Yes, given two assets that are the same on every other front, we would prefer SaaS because I think like you said, the revenue is much more ratable and predictable and also the business has longer legs for the future. And all of our acquisitions have had a strong eye towards improving the relevance of our product portfolio overall going forward, right. So we continue to invest in our own product portfolio to keep it current and relevant, but we want to buy companies that have greater relevance going forward.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

And I think that so I think those kind of things will drive us to look at more SaaS. I don't think there's going to be a concerted thing that says let's not look at on prem. Yes, we have the ability to run SaaS businesses at excellent gross margins, which is the envy of almost any other SaaS software company out there. But at the same time, right, licensed businesses have even slightly better gross margin. So we're not necessarily going to just say let's go look only at SaaS, but yes, I think you can reliably expect that over time there'll be more SaaS acquisitions.

Pinjalim Bora
Pinjalim Bora
Executive Director at JP Morgan

Got it. Thank you for that. And Anthony, one question for you on the guidance. You outperformed on your Q1 guide. It seems like the FX headwind year over year annually has lowered versus what you baked in coming into the year.

Pinjalim Bora
Pinjalim Bora
Executive Director at JP Morgan

But still seems like you kind of maintained the full year guidance.

Pinjalim Bora
Pinjalim Bora
Executive Director at JP Morgan

I just want to be sure, I mean,

Pinjalim Bora
Pinjalim Bora
Executive Director at JP Morgan

it makes sense. There's a lot of uncertainty. So companies being prudent completely makes sense. But I want to just be sure is that just that, just you being prudent or are you actually seeing something in the pipeline that makes you being more conservative?

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

No. I think Pendulum, we came in I would say this, we came in right at the high end of our range for the quarter. And to us that means we hit an upside case. I think there's a little bit of FX benefit as we look at the full year results relative to where we were last quarter. But I think as we all know in this environment, those FX movements can come and go.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

It's not really something we took a lot of consideration of when we set the guide. For us, it was more operational to say, okay, it's Q1, we hit an upside case for Q1, which is great, but it's still Q1. I think we're rarely going to raise our revenue outlook after Q1, but it certainly gives us a lot more confidence as we go into the remaining three quarters of the year. Understood. Thank you very much.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question coming from the line of Lucky Schroeder with D. A. Davidson. Your line is now open.

Lucky Schreiner
Associate VP, Research Analyst at D.A. Davidson

Great. Thanks very much and congrats on the quarter. This is a bit of a nitpicky question, I know, but just can you help me understand the slight decline in ARR quarter over quarter? Is there anything to call out for that change, especially since it looks like share file still grew decently well in the quarter?

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

Yes. Hey, Lucky. Good observation and yes, that's we've seen that before in fourth quarter to first quarter sort of transitions. Part of that is because we've got a lot of ARR in maintenance contracts. And as you might imagine, sort of the Q4 to Q1 to Q2 timeframe is one where there's a heavy concentration of those contracts and sometimes they slip out of a quarter in terms of their renewal.

Anthony Folger
Anthony Folger
CFO at Progress Software

If we don't have a contract in house and signed, we do not count the ARR. And so sometimes Q4 to Q1, we will see a slight, I'll call it a seasonal dip in ARR. And then we generally see that bounce back in the second quarter. If you were to look back at some of our Q1 earnings calls, maybe '23 or '22, you'd probably see a similar trend line. So nothing out of the ordinary from our perspective.

Lucky Schreiner
Associate VP, Research Analyst at D.A. Davidson

Got you. That's helpful. And then there was a lot of commentary around your positioning in AI. Can you maybe just help me understand how much of that is meaningful to the business today in terms of like revenue generation and customers building those AI powered applications? And a bit of a nuance one, any impact on M and A in terms of the companies available out there?

Lucky Schreiner
Associate VP, Research Analyst at D.A. Davidson

I know that they're typically more expensive than you'd be willing to buy, but a bit of a two part there.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

So from my perspective, Lucky, the customers that we are winning on AI offerings are still anecdotal, right. And so I don't want us to think that there is a meaningful revenue that we are seeing, which is why we keep saying that we expect our NRR growth to be low single digits, right? By the way, just year over year this year, I think our NRR growth was 3.4%, but if you exclude share file, it was 2.5%, right, Anthony? Yes. So 2.5% if you exclude share file from both those periods.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

So we have a strong steady business. So we're not seeing enough traction to basically say, oh, you know what, we think we have revenue upside that we can start talking about. But if we do, we absolutely will share that. From an acquisition perspective, again, there are some companies that are completely priced at valuations that are not just out of our reach, but out of reach of almost practically everyone else as well. There are very few people who can buy them.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

But from our perspective, there are lots and lots of companies that offer capabilities that are essential in people's AI journey, right. And I go back to MarkLogic acquisition, right. Being able to do semantic analysis and leverage content and data, bring it together and be able to make sense out of it, leverage a vector database and effectively create a VAG solution out of it, which we did at progress after the acquisition, it enabled us to now get into the market and talk about the stories we're talking about. So I think that we can find companies and assets that have those capabilities in your share file, right. It has more AI capabilities in its product than pretty much anyone else in the competitive landscape that it is in, right.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

And so I think that to us, we are looking for those businesses that have significant go forward relevance, including AI capabilities, including being possibly SaaS, including ability for us to help our customers with their AI journey. And I think that really is key. We will look at, for example, our Chef offering, right. As businesses deploy massive scale applications and massive infrastructures to go with it, right. They have to make sure that that deployment and changes and configurations and compliance and all that stuff is done the way they want it done, which is what something like Chef does.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

So I think that there are what I would call products that enable our customers to really help them build reliable, responsible AI business applications and experiences and deploy them and run them well. And that's what we continue to look for.

Lucky Schreiner
Associate VP, Research Analyst at D.A. Davidson

Appreciate the answer. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. And our next question coming from the line of John DiFucci with Guggenheim Securities. Your line is now open.

Lawrence Vensko
Analyst at Guggenheim Securities

Hi, this is Lawrence Fence calling for John DiFucci. Thanks for taking my question. So internationally, there are clearly many geopolitical forces at play. And we were wondering if you have seen any resulting changes in any of the major geographies that you operate in outside of The U. S.

Lawrence Vensko
Analyst at Guggenheim Securities

Has there been any uncharacteristic weakness or strength that's worth calling out? And are you expecting any in fiscal twenty twenty five? Thank you.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

Hey, Laurence, thanks for the question. Again, so far nothing, right, is a short answer. We keep watch. We are very careful. We are a global company.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

As you said, we have businesses, customers around the world. We have employees around the world who serve them. We are monitoring whether there will be sentiment changes and so on. And if so, we will share. But at this point, customers have trusted us for decades.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

We are embedded in their mission critical systems. We are being used by them to run things that are core to their business. And so really I think, yes, maybe there is some sentiment out there that others are seeing, but we are at this point not seeing anything. Neither positive nor negative, I want to make sure that it's clear that isn't just negative sentiment I'm talking about. So there's really for us, it's been steady as she goes.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

Execution continues to be really going well. Our teams continue to execute. They are focused on serving our customers and our customers understand that. And they understand that we are a business that is dedicated to making them successful and innovating and investing towards their success. And I think that's why we are the trustworthy partner.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

So, so far so good.

Lawrence Vensko
Analyst at Guggenheim Securities

Okay. That's clear. Thank you. And also thank you for that fast data.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

You're welcome, Mark.

Operator

Thank you. And I'm not showing any further questions in the queue at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Yokesh Gupta for any closing remarks.

Yogesh Gupta
Yogesh Gupta
CEO at Progress Software

Thank you everyone for joining. We are delighted with our performance in Q1 and we look forward to speaking with you again at our Q2 results. Thanks again.

Operator

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

Executives
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Earnings Conference Call
Progress Software Q1 2025
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