Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Tecsys 3rd quarter fiscal 2023 results conference call. Please note that the complete 3rd quarter report, including MD&A and financial statements, were filed on SEDAR after market closed yesterday. All dollar amounts are expressed in Canadian currency and are prepared in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards. Some of the statements in this conference call, including the question and answer period, may include forward-looking statements that are based on management's beliefs and assumptions. Actual results may differ materially from such statements. I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded on Thursday, March 2, 2023 at 8:30 A.M. Eastern Time. I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Peter Brereton, Chief Executive Officer at Tecsys. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Joining me today is Mark Bentler, our Chief Financial Officer. We appreciate you joining us for today's call. Before getting into our third quarter results, I wanted to take a moment to welcome Shannon Karl to the position of Chief Marketing Officer. Shannon comes to us with an impressive reputation at organizations like SAP, IBM, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. As we scale up our sales and marketing efforts, we're excited to have Shannon on board and look forward to the positive impact she'll have on our marketing pipeline and demand generation activities. Our company began fiscal year 2023 with strong growth underscored by solid SaaS bookings, and that momentum accelerated in Q3. This quarter, SaaS bookings at CAD 5.8 million set a new record.
Bookings in the quarter spanned both new and base accounts, the latter of which included six significant SaaS migration and expansion deals, highlighting the ongoing value that our existing customers see in the Tecsys platform. We also added another healthcare IDN. In fact, we have had 15 healthcare networks either buy into or expand their engagement with Tecsys SaaS so far this fiscal year. Our SaaS offering is proven to be a system of choice for organizations grappling with supply chain complexity. I'd like to take a moment to summarize some of the key announcements that we made during the quarter on partnerships as well as a product launch, and then the key events of the third quarter of fiscal 2023 and results of operations. Mark will walk us through the financial results in more detail. Finally, I will comment on our outlook, followed by Q&A.
Since our last results call, we made two notable partnership announcements. With respect to healthcare, Pardon me. We announced our certified integration status with Workday, an important milestone that supports the work we do at customer sites like Prisma Health, South Carolina's largest health system, and Corewell Health, the Michigan-based merger of Spectrum Health and Beaumont Health. With respect to warehouse automation, we also announced our partnership with SVT Robotics, a key technology partner that provides integration software, which will give our customers broad access to new and emerging robotic solutions as these technologies become more and more important to be competitive in industry. We also officially launched our Warehouse-in-a-Warehouse e-commerce fulfillment solution designed for the converging distribution market. This is a warehouse management solution that helps run an e-commerce fulfillment business inside a wholesale or distribution warehouse, already running a more traditional pallet and case-oriented software package.
We are pleased to share that we have implemented this model for a global luxury cosmetics retailer whose existing ERP wasn't agile enough to handle their growing e-commerce business. There are a couple of key indicators I'd like to highlight which are contributing to our continued track record of stable growth as a SaaS organization. Last quarter, we highlighted an important milestone when our SaaS revenue became our most dominant recurring revenue stream, representing over half of total recurring revenue. We're now reporting a 36% increase in SaaS revenue for this quarter compared to the same quarter last year. Based on bookings in Q3, we expect SaaS revenue to exceed $10 million in Q4, another interesting milestone. We feel like this is just getting started. On top of that, our gross and net retention levels remain very robust.
Our SaaS ARR bookings are up 152% in the quarter and up 68% for fiscal 2023 year-to-date through three quarters compared to the same period last year. Due to strong bookings in the quarter, our professional services backlog at $38 million is up about 29% from the same time last year. We believe that this is another leading indicator of where revenue growth is heading. With growing SaaS backlog and many major delivery projects in the backlog, we are seeing traction for the Tecsys value proposition across all industries in which we do business within a market that is highly engaged. Tecsys is proving to be among the best cloud-based solutions available in the markets we serve, we have the people, the products, and the plan to provide what the market demands.
Mark will now provide further details on our third quarter and first nine months financial results.
Thank you, Peter. We are very pleased with the strong performance in our third quarter ended January 31st, 2023. Total revenue was a record $38.9 million, 10% higher than $35.4 million reported for the same period last year. Total revenue, excluding hardware, increased 12% compared to the same period last year, or 10% on a constant currency basis. As many of you know, the significant portion of our revenue, in fact, about 68% this quarter, is denominated in U.S. dollars. As a result, movements in currency exchange rates have impact on our reported revenue and growth.
We continue to experience strong and steady revenue streams underpinned by a 36% increase in SaaS revenue, up from $7.0 million in Q3 2022 to $9.5 million in Q3 2023. On a constant currency basis, SaaS revenue was up 33% compared to the same quarter last year. SaaS remaining performance obligation, also known as RPO or SaaS backlog, was $128.3 million at the end of Q3 fiscal 2023. That's up 63% from $78.5 million at the same time last year. On a constant currency basis, that growth was 58%. Maintenance and support revenue for the three months ended January 31, 2023 was $8.4 million, up 2% compared to the same quarter last year, or flat on a constant currency basis.
Maintenance and support revenue generally follows the trend of license revenue, and we expect that as current customers migrate to our SaaS offering, maintenance and support revenue will decline over time. Professional service revenue for the third quarter was $13.6 million, up 5% from $12.9 million reported for the same quarter last year, or 2% on a constant currency basis. As we've noted the last few quarters, we're starting to see the impact that our transition to SaaS will ultimately have on our professional services revenue line. That is, we're seeing a continued reduction in custom development work as customers opt for a more out-of-the-box approach to platform implementations. We're also continuing to experience the increased collaboration of our partner ecosystem in helping to implement our systems.
While we expect that over time, these factors will continue to moderate our professional services revenue growth, we had a very robust professional services bookings quarter, which I'll get to in a second. As we discussed in our published MD&A, we expect total services revenue, so that's combined SaaS, maintenance, support, as well as professional services, ranging between $32.5 million and $33.5 million per quarter in the short term. License revenue in the quarter was $1.1 million compared to $0.9 million in the same period in fiscal 2022. As we have stated before, with most of our software bookings now SaaS, we expect license revenue to decline in general over time. In the current quarter, we did book one new logo license deal.
We certainly don't see this as a trend. We had some user count expansions on the base. Hardware revenue in Q3 fiscal 2023 was $6.4 million, flat compared to the same period last year. By way of reminder, we sell primarily third-party hardware to our customers for warehouse operations and in-hospital point of use storage and tracking. This part of our business tends to be lumpy, and revenue recognition here is tied to delivery timing. That said, like last quarter, our hardware backlog remains strong, driven primarily by hospital network point of use orders. Turning now to bookings. SaaS bookings are reported on an annual recurring revenue basis. As Peter mentioned, SaaS bookings were up 152% in the quarter to a record $5.8 million, compared to $2.3 million in Q3 last year.
I would point out that while SaaS bookings can be somewhat lumpy due to the timing of quarter deal closings, it's also helpful to look at a longer-term period to see the positive trend on SaaS bookings. We have been seeing some sustained momentum with SaaS bookings up 68% year-to-date compared to the same period last year. This is a leading indicator of SaaS revenue growth. Professional services bookings were $19.8 million in the quarter, up 112% compared to $9.3 million in the same quarter last year. That's up 6% year-to-date compared to the first nine months of fiscal 2022. This highlights the lumpiness and impact of timing on reported quarterly bookings.
As Peter noted, professional services backlog was a robust CAD 38.2 million at January 31, 2023, up 29% from the same time last year. For the third quarter, total gross profit was CAD 17.0 million. That's up 12% compared to CAD 15.2 million in Q3 of last year, led by higher gross profit contribution from SaaS maintenance, support, and professional services. As a percentage of revenue, gross margin was 44% compared to 43% for the same period last year. Combined SaaS, maintenance, support, and professional services gross profit margin for the three months ended January 31, 2023 was 47%, flat compared to the same period in fiscal 2022, but up sequentially from 46% compared to Q2 of fiscal 2023.
We expect to see continued services margin improvement in the coming quarters as the business continues to scale and as we focus development and operational energy on optimizing platform efficiency. In fact, we added a new slide to our investor presentation, which is available on our website, that provides some directional indication of where SaaS and combined services margins would end up under certain projection assumptions. As I said last quarter, we see this as a multi-year journey with incremental benefits building over time. Switching now to our expenses for the quarter. Operating expenses increased to $16.0 million, higher by $2.1 million or 15% compared to $13.9 million in Q3 of fiscal 2022.
Operating expenses are up compared to the same quarter last year, primarily because of higher sales and marketing costs. Higher research and development costs, including the impact of unfavorable foreign exchange rates. Sales and marketing costs were up sequentially in Q3 on higher marketing program spend and employee-related costs. We expect an increase in sales and marketing costs sequentially in Q4 that will be slightly more modest than the increase we saw in Q3. I'd also draw your attention to another new slide we added to our investor presentation that provides some insight into how we measure sales and marketing efficiency by comparing customer acquisition cost to lifetime value of expected margin contribution. Now moving to research and development costs. Compared to Q2, research and development costs were down slightly in Q3. Q3 actually benefited from a $0.4 million true-up of R&D tax credits and e-business credits.
As a result of this and increasing run rate costs, we expect Q4 research and development costs to increase relative to Q3. Net profit for the quarter was CAD 888,000 or CAD 0.06 per basic and fully diluted share, compared to CAD 940,000 or CAD 0.06 per share for the same period in fiscal 2022. Adjusted EBITDA was CAD 2.8 million in Q3 of 2023, compared to CAD 2.7 million in Q3 last year. Net profit and adjusted EBITDA were both positively impacted by a favorable foreign exchange of approximately CAD 0.2 million compared to the same period last year. Turning now very briefly to our results for the nine months, first nine months of fiscal 2023.
Our total revenue was $111.2 million, up 8%, compared to $102.9 million for the first three quarters of last fiscal year, and up 6% on a constant currency basis. SaaS revenue for fiscal year 2023 year to date was $26.3 million. That was up 37% compared to $19.2 million in the same period last year, and that's 33% growth on a constant currency basis. Our net profit for fiscal 2023 year to date was $1.6 million, compared to $1.9 million in the same period last year. Foreign exchange movements had a positive impact of approximately $1.2 million on profit and adjusted EBITDA compared to the same period last year.
Adjusted EBITDA was $7.0 million for the first three quarters of fiscal 2023, compared to $8.4 million last year. We ended Q3 fiscal 2023 with a solid balance sheet position. We repaid our long-term loan in December 2022. As a result, we're now debt-free. On January 31, 2023, we had cash and cash equivalents and short-term investments of $27.9 million. That was down $15.3 million compared to $43.2 million at the end of fiscal 2022. The decrease results primarily from the repayment of long-term debt, seasonal working capital fluctuations, and payment of dividends. I'll now turn the call back to Peter to provide some outlook comments.
Thanks, Mark. Tecsys' performance in the third quarter of fiscal 2023 was strong. We have a strong balance sheet and a robust backlog and excellent sales pipeline. We are seeing widespread buyer intent across target markets, solid opportunity cycles, and a highly capable sales team with the tools and talent to capitalize on a market that is ready to invest in new technology. Our increasing market share in healthcare, supported by an increasingly robust partner network and growing acceptance of the clinically integrated supply chain and consolidated service center model, together with our expanded healthcare sector offering, gives us confidence that the healthcare sector will continue to serve as an important revenue stream for us.
Turning to converging distribution, we continue to hone our sweet spot there and carve out our share of a massive market opportunity driven by fundamental changes to the supply chain industry, changes spurred by aging existing systems, digital adoption, and a realization that heightened consumer expectations are here to stay. We are pleased that our third quarter of fiscal 2023 continues to demonstrate our dominance in key markets and emerging opportunities in growth markets. It isn't hard to see that accelerated change is on the horizon when it comes to supply chain management, and companies are starting to invest in that change. We believe that the remainder of fiscal 2023 is tracking well against our internal KPIs, and we are well positioned to expand our footprint in this growing market.
In summary, I want to remind analysts and investors of our key themes as we look to a successful fiscal 2023 and beyond. First, we'll continue to maintain a laser focus on expanding our SaaS revenue model. Secondly, we'll continue to deepen and strengthen our partnership ecosystem. This is key for us to scale rapidly into North American and international markets. Third, we will continue to expand and refine our distribution and omni-channel business platforms to service evolving needs in both our healthcare supply chain and Converging Distribution Market segments. Across our markets, we will place emphasis on customer success. We have long stood by the philosophy of customers for life. A big part of that formula is to deliver value fast, stay connected, and expand on the value delivered. With that, we'll open the call up for questions. Thank you.
Thank you. If you would like to register a question, please press the 1 followed by the 4 on your telephone. You will hear a three-tone prompt to acknowledge your request. If your question has been answered and you would like to withdraw your registration, please press the 1 followed by the 3. Again, to register for a question, please press the 1 followed by the 4. One moment for the first question.
It comes from the line of Suthan Sukumar with Stifel. Please proceed.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. It's Daniel on for Suthan today. For my first question, it's on professional services. It looks like bookings grew at a healthy clip this quarter. I know you mentioned in the past that you're shifting some more work to your partners. For the quarter, are you seeing stronger attach rates? Is the work still more centered on the client service side, or has that changed?
Yeah, I think I'll take that one, if it's okay, Peter. Hey, Daniel. Thanks for the question. Yeah, we're seeing, you know, the attach rates are moving around a little bit. I mean, I think, you know, with what happened in the quarter with this very significant booking level just in general, with SaaS, you know, at $5.8, we saw over $19 million of PS bookings come in. I think we got a, you know, we've got a reasonably good attach rate there. We still see a lot of activity with our partner ecosystem. We see more and more interest, you know, from SIs and potential SIs.
We see positive things there, but, you know, that attach rate and the level of bookings that we saw in the quarter were definitely robust.
Thanks. For my second question here. With regards to IDN wins, I think you mentioned that you added 1 new IDN win this quarter in your prepared remarks. Can you provide us an update on the deal and implementation cycles within healthcare at the moment?
Yeah, I mean, from the standpoint of overall deal flow, I mean, it always sort of ebbs and flows a little bit. You know, at this point, we're at, what would we be at, Mark? I should know this. Are we at six year to date now signed?
Yep.
Yeah. Six IDN signed this fiscal year. you know, we still think we're gonna continue to see some pretty good momentum there. you know, our objective is to get that up, you know, to 12 per year and then eventually up to 20 per year. We think we're on track to do that. We see actually our, you know, even some of the sales reps that have joined us within the last 12 months- 18 months are now driving very significant pipelines in healthcare. The deal flow looks very strong, and the average deal size looks very strong. We're very happy with that. The implementation cycles really haven't changed, I would say.
We are starting to make some headway in using sort of some artificial intelligence techniques to refine data master data. That is having an effect on some of the implementations to accelerate the implementation cycles. We'll see how that plays out, the quality of master data in healthcare has always been a challenge. You'll often end up, even within a network, if they've got 20 hospitals in a network, sometimes different hospitals are calling the same item by different item numbers and different descriptions and so on. When you start putting in an integrated end-to-end supply chain platform, obviously that's a problem. You need the same item identifier to be able to do, you know, consolidated forecasting and demand planning and run an efficient supply chain.
We're now, you know, that sometimes used to take months to clean up that data. You know, we've developed an artificial intelligence product that we're just in the process of working through to final release, but we're already using it in the field, and it's working out quite well. We'll see how that continues to play out. That may end up being able to shorten some of these implementation time frames. Other than that, they've remained pretty constant. I mean, if it's a straight consolidated service center, the implementation will typically be 6 months-8 months. If it's a full end-to-end rollout across a large hospital network, it'll, you know, it'll take two years.
Great. That's good to hear. Just one last quick question from Mark here on growth investments. Can you provide us an update on the expected size and timing of ongoing growth investments and their impact to margins in the near term?
Yeah. Can you just... I didn't quite hear you. You said on what type of investment?
Growth. Ongoing growth investments.
Oh, okay. Yeah. Just in general, I get it. I mean, a couple different vectors there. We've been talking about, professional services and how we've invested there. I mean, we've got a pretty significant team there, and we've been, you know, we haven't been growing that team, very rapidly here. We've got what we think is capacity that'll, you know, with the existing team that can drive, you know, slightly higher revenue than where we're at right now on that line. That's probably in pretty good shape, you know, for a while. I think in terms of, you know, sales and marketing and R&D, I think we continue to grow there. In the prepared remarks, you know, we made some comments about, you know, how we think about investing in sales and marketing.
In fact, you know, we added a new slide in our investor presentation that's on our website there, which describes how we, you know, how we measure sales and marketing investment and efficiency. You know, our near-term expectation there is that, you know, we're gonna continue to invest to capture market share. No change there. On the R&D side, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, you know, what we saw there in the current quarter was a slight, you know, we had a bit of a true-up that we recorded in the quarter on R&D tax credits.
The R&D expense that came through in Q3 was a little bit lower than, you know, what it will be next quarter without that, without that adjustment in it and with some continued, you know, increase in run rate costs. Yeah, we continue to see some investment happening in those areas going forward.
Great. That's helpful. I'll pass the line here.
Our next question comes line of Gavin Fairweather with Cormark. Please proceed.
Oh, hey, good morning.
Hey, Gavin.
Good morning.
Just to clarify, did you say 6 SaaS migrations this quarter?
Yep, we did.
Yep.
We said six migrations and expansions.
Okay. I guess I'm just curious how you're thinking about this going forward. I think in the fall, product release is gonna be SaaS only. How is that kind of changing the nature of conversations with the base around migration? Like, do you expect that to be a catalyst to continue to drive, you know, this trend forward?
Yeah, I mean, there's no question. I mean, you know, as you may know, our 22.1 release that was the release we released last year in the spring. That was our last on-prem release. I mean, anyone now who is looking at, you know, anyone in our customer base that is looking at, you know, our latest product releases, you know, all the work we're doing around the Drug Supply Chain Security Act, you know, work we're doing, you know, that I mentioned there about, you know, using artificial intelligence to accelerate, you know, data master cleansing, all of that kind of, you know, enhancement and forward movement is only on the SaaS platform.
Because of that, you know, we're seeing a steady rising interest in the SaaS platform. Combine that, of course, with the fact that, you know, increasingly organizations find it's getting, well, it's just getting more and more difficult to operate your own, you know, your own data center. You know, it's hard to keep the people, it's hard to maintain security, it's hard to protect against ransomware. There's a variety of reasons why sort of interest in public cloud is rising. Combine that with the fact that, you know, all of our new developments and features and functionality are only on the SaaS platform. It's, we're definitely seeing an accelerating move to migrate to the SaaS platform.
I know that you, I mean, you typically sign multi-year contracts. Should we think about that maintenance stream over the next kinda, you know, three years-five years really declining, quite significantly with obviously a big upsell and, you know, revenue accretion on the SaaS line?
It should, Gavin. I mean, it, you know, it's held remarkably steady so far. You know, frankly, we've been pleasantly surprised how it's held steady, but it has to begin to decline. I mean, the migration over is just, you know, becoming quite significant and, you know, is definitely outpacing, you know, price increases and expansions in the on-prem side of things. You know, so we certainly expect the maintenance revenue line to begin to turn down, you know, really within the near term. I mean, Mark, I don't know if you wanna add any more color to that.
Yeah, no, I think that's exactly the point. I mean, in the quarter, Gavin, what we saw here was, it was, you know, it's pretty extreme from what we've seen historically in terms of the number of migrations in one quarter. You know, that'll start to move the needle on maintenance revenue. On the other hand, you know, we did see, you know, we did see. While we keep saying, you know, expect license revenue to decline, we did see another $1 million license quarter, you know. That's back-to-back $1 million license quarters, and we definitely don't expect, you know, we don't expect that to continue.
That'll also put pressure on, you know, lower additive maintenance coming into that line at the same time that migrations are sort of, you know, taking maintenance and shifting it up to SaaS.
Got it. Maybe just on, you know, converging distribution. The Manhattan commentary was, I'd say, cautiously optimistic on, kind of the demand environment there. Curious if you've seen any kind of green shoots on that side of the business or whether the sales environment has shifted at all in, kind of the past three or six months.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're definitely seeing the same green shoots. It's interesting. You know, we're, you know, Steve Sybert is the VP of sales that heads that sales team. You know, I know I sat in a pipeline review that he was leading the other day, I mean, his confidence and optimism is way up from 6 months ago. I mean, you know, in the fall, there was still a lot of Pardon me. I had a cold that ended last week, but this cough won't go away. But, you know, he was In the fall, we saw a lot of top-of-funnel activity that I think I talked about on a fall conference call.
You know, we saw just a lot of tire kicking, but not a lot of movement, you know, into the actual sales pipeline, and that now seems to be shifting. We're seeing a lot of good activity moving right into the sales pipeline. We're certainly, you know, optimistic that business is starting to, you know, heat up again. I mean, their supply chain issues have largely smoothed out, right? I mean, you know, a year ago, I mean, they couldn't get product from China. The factories, so many factories were closed down and the, you know, container costs were extreme, and the backlogs of the ports were crazy and whatever else. That's all smoothed out.
I mean, you've probably seen the Port of Los Angeles now has actually spare capacity or, sorry, Port of Los Angeles, I mean, now has spare capacity. The price of a container has come back down to, you know, not quite to pre-pandemic norms, but it's come the vast majority of the way back down again. Everything's really starting to flow again, and as a result, a lot of these organizations are able to start looking towards the future rather than just focusing on current crisis.
That's very helpful. Appreciate your commentary on Salesforce productivity. I haven't yet gotten to the slide in your deck. I'm curious, like how many of your AEs within healthcare are kind of relatively new, let's say kinda added within the past 18 months? Maybe just touch on kind of the pipeline generation in that newer cohort and maybe how much bookings upside there could be as the, you know, the newer reps mature.
Yeah, I mean, we'll see how that continues to turn out. That's something Bill King is tracking very closely. You know, he sort of talks about his, you know, his juniors and his sophomores and his seniors and, you know, looks at sort of how their pipelines are moving. It's interesting. I mean, our long-term sales reps that have been with us a long time in that market, they currently are carrying, I think, roughly a third of the pipeline.
Yeah.
You know, two-thirds of the pipeline is really being carried by our reps that have joined us really over the last three years. You know, I don't know if I wanna give more detail than that, but we're pretty happy to see the success in pipeline building that's happening. Of course, it factors into the strategic planning process we're going through now as we look at our next fiscal year to say sort of, "Okay, how much do we grow that team? How fast do we grow that team," et cetera. I mean, the success in pipeline building that has happened with the ones that joined us two years ago and the ones that joined us one year ago certainly encourages us to keep the investment going.
That's great. I'll pass the line.
Our next question comes line of Nick Agostino with Laurentian Bank. Please proceed.
Yes, good morning, guys.
Good morning.
Just circling back the comment you made, I guess, on the complex distribution pipeline improving over the last 6 months. I'm just wondering, what are your clients seeing, thinking that is maybe changing their approach, specifically in complex distribution? Just maybe any other comments you might have on the other market segments, healthcare and retail when it comes to the economy and a potential recession in general.
I mean, what we're seeing is that it's. You know, I mean, complex distribution, in many ways, is more of a horizontal than a vertical, right? It spans many industries. The recession fears are very much, you know, centered in certain industries. You know, I mean, we've got clients that, for instance, mainly sell sort of truly high-end luxury goods. They don't seem to be worried at all about recession. You know, we've got clients that are selling, you know, wine and spirits. You know, they're not worried. You know, we got clients that are in, you know, supplying the construction industry. They're not worried. You know, they've gone through a period of time where there were so many supply chain shortages.
They, you know, they had sort of some bumper years, they're seeing more of a return to normalcy, but they're still seeing, you know, perfectly healthy demand looking ahead into the future. You know, there are some segments, you know, giftware, some home furnishings areas, et cetera, where there seems to be more caution. You know, I mean, our approach always in the, in the convergent distribution market has been to sort of focus on this year's hotspots. You know, those hotspots kind of move around. You know, that's why right now, for us, even though there's some segments that are definitely acting cautious, there's plenty of segments that are not acting cautious at all and are saying, "You know what?
We've come through some pretty strong couple of years here, and we now need to invest for the future," and so on. We're, you know, we're seeing that overall activity level up, you know, quite significantly. We'll see how it plays out. In some ways, you don't really know until the deals start to sign. You know, actual deal signature is still slow in that space, but the pipeline movement is now looking quite healthy. In healthcare, you know, specifically the hospital space, it's, you know... I mean, that market just continues to be on fire. I mean, I've never seen that market in such a hurry.
You know, they are anxious to get supply chain platforms rolled out, whether they're using our pro services or third-party services, you know, other sort of members of the ecosystem, RiseNow, you know, Deloitte, et cetera. It's sort of, "Okay, let's get this done. Let's get this in. Let's, let's, you know, get much better at managing our supply chain issues." I mean, the backlog issues and the allocation issues that plagued that industry during the worst of the pandemic have settled down for some supplies. By and large, there's a growing recognition that the supply chain issues that have plagued... You know, if you ignore the blip that is the pandemic, the supply chain issues that have plagued healthcare over the last 10 or 12 years are only getting worse.
So there's a real focus on saying, "We need agile supply chains that are real-time digital platforms that can help us to deal with these issues." so that market is only getting hotter.
Okay. I appreciate that. That was excellent color. Just curious on that license deal that you guys announced for the quarter. Just given everything you said about the shift to the public cloud, maybe just a little bit of color as to what sector that customer was in and maybe what the, what the basis was for signing a license deal as opposed to signing a SaaS deal.
A bit of a unique situation. It's a, you know. You know, I don't wanna give out names or whatever, but that's a, you know, a general industrial sort of supplies type company. The, you know, the internal sort of, thought process in that company is that they weren't ready to adopt SaaS yet. They knew they were literally buying the last release of an on-prem product line. They knew there was gonna be no upgrades coming as part of the product line. They had searched the industry. They had looked at, you know, all of the usual suspects. They checked out NetSuite. They checked out Microsoft.
They'd looked at, you know, some of the Oracle and SAP products and so on, ended up coming back and saying, "You know, you really have the best product for a, you know, a true sort of business to business wholesale type, platform." They decided to just go with it anyway. We decided to take them on. Our hope is that, you know, over time, as they get more comfortable with the SaaS world and, you know, we continue to move forward with more and more capability in the SaaS platform, that they'll eventually migrate over to the SaaS platform. We think given that that product line, I mean, that they bought, is already sort of coming up on its first birthday, you know, we really do think that's probably the last one.
Okay. Appreciate that color. The last question, just on the hardware revenue. It was a strong number this quarter. Just trying to understand, supply chain bottleneck that you guys talked about in the past. Any movement that would have helped you guys, you know, I guess print that strong hardware number, and specifically on PropTech. Has that side of the hardware market improved over the last few quarters or even over the last quarter? Gonna leave it there. Thanks.
Yeah. Nick, we continue to have challenges there on the PropTech side. So that number that you saw in the quarter wasn't pushed upward by, you know, by supply chain issues being resolved in the quarter on PropTech. But we do. I mean, mixed picture here, like, that was a pretty big hardware number anyway, in Q3. That said, PropTech supply chain issues do seem to be starting to come to resolution now. We expect in fact to be, you know, starting to ship some PropTech, some PropTech stuff, maybe not yet in Q4, but just after, probably in Q1 and Q2, and beyond, we're gonna start seeing that loosen up.
Okay. Great. Thank you.
Our next question comes line of John Shao with National Bank. Please proceed.
Hey, good morning, guys, and thanks for taking my questions. I'm just curious about any other opportunities down the road regarding your product ecosystem. Peter, you already mentioned, like, your in-integration with Workday, collaboration with a robotic company, a rapid implementation in retail space. Anything else we should be expecting?
Not really in the short term. I mean, we're really looking to deepen the relationships with the ones that we've already got in place now. You know, I mean, there's always some organizations that we work with in the field, you know, where the sales reps from those organizations work with the sales reps from our organization, even though in fact sometimes, you know, the other company's head office, you know, thinks they compete with us kind of thing. You know, that kind of thing continues to happen. But in terms of these sort of mainline partnerships, you know, Workday, I mean, we continue to look to deepen that relationship. If you look at, you know, what's happening with Deloitte, I think there's huge opportunity to deepen the relationship with Deloitte.
It, you know, RiseNow continues to grow at a very significant clip, largely on the, you know, on our platform. I mean, they're hiring people. They're building out resources. They're taking on more projects, largely around assisting with implementing our platform and the, you know, all of the ancillary work that goes around that. Our focus really is just continuing to deepen those relationships more than anything else.
Great. Thanks. I think, Peter, you also mentioned international market in your prepared remarks. How should we assess this part of the opportunity, and how should we think about your go-to-market strategy and outside North America?
Yeah. That is interesting. We'll see how that develops. You know, the latest platform that we released in the fall, the 22.2 release, contained a lot of additional functionality for the Western European market space, specifically some of the regulatory requirements for France and Germany. We're, you know, we're already seeing deployments happening now in that region. We've got some other opportunities in the pipeline that look like they're moving along well. We expect to see more of that. You know, as you know, we had been looking for and continue to look for a right acquisition to really accelerate building out our market presence in that region.
Those are proving very difficult to find, at least at any, you know, at least at prices that are anywhere near rational, in our opinion. It may well be that, we just begin to build that out organically, and we're gonna be making that decision in the next, probably over the next, couple of months.
Okay, thanks. Last question from me is, if I recall from last few quarters earnings call, there were some challenges with client capacity, talent shortage, and the supply chain with your hardware. When I think about those challenges, can we say they're kind of moderated and we're now in a more normalized environment?
You know, they're moderating, but I think they're moderating because of specific proactive steps the clients are taking to deal with them. You know, there's been substantial increases in wages paid for supply chain workers in warehouses and so on, that allow those positions to effectively compete for talent with, you know, Uber drivers and, you know, all the other places that some of those people have gone. There's also, you know, agencies that have grown up to help to fill those spaces that are, you know, dealing with, you know, returning military placements and so on that can really help to fill some of those roles. Robotics is growing very significantly and is enabling some of these warehouses to, you know, get the same work done with less people.
I mean, robotics sometimes doesn't make any sense when you can hire warehouse workers for $15 an hour. When you're having to pay $30 an hour, all of a sudden the whole, you know, robotics starts to make a lot more economic sense. We're seeing a real increase in the rollout of robotics, allowing, you know, many of these places to run with, you know, smaller pools of users. It is starting to abate, but I think it's starting to abate not because the labor market is changing, but because the, you know, these organizations are sort of rising to the challenge and finding new ways to attract and keep talent and yet use less of it at the same time.
Okay. That's great, Paul. I think that's all for now.
Great. Thanks.
As a reminder to register for a question, please press the 1 followed by the 4. Our next question comes line of Rini Sharma with BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed.
Good morning, Peter and Mark. Thank you for taking my call.
Good morning.
Good morning. You've already spoken extensively about the pipeline in both healthcare and complex distribution. Would you be able to provide us maybe some color on the split between the two segments and how you expect that to evolve?
I'm sorry, I missed the one word. On the what between the two markets?
The split.
The split. Sure. I mean, the right now our pipeline, it overall is 2/3, roughly 2/3 healthcare. In spite of the fact that. You know, if you look at our company revenue, we're still, you know, 55% non-healthcare. You know, we certainly expect that in the next, I would even say the next 12 months-24 months, we expect healthcare to continue to be probably 2/3 of the pipeline. You know, as we look out longer, if you start looking out at sort of the 3rd year, we do expect just because of sheer market size and sort of rising demand, we expect that to come back to, you know, probably somewhere more around 50/50. You know, we'll see. I mean, that gets into real crystal ball gazing in terms of how that's gonna play out.
Certainly right now, You know, our pipeline is absolutely dominated by healthcare.
When you think of, you know, growth investments over the next 12 months, would you consider, you know, if the demand is lower in complex distribution, a little bit higher on the healthcare side, so is it a possibility that, you know, you would allocate investments accordingly?
Yeah. I mean, certainly, you know, our focus here is on the healthcare market. I mean, there are certain functional things that we know we need to invest in for the general distribution market. Because it is such a sizable market and has so much future potential, we intend to remain very competitive in that market. From an R&D standpoint, we're continuing to invest in the platform for that market. There is a lot of carryover. I mean, you know, we're beginning to invest, for instance, in, you know, updating the APIs across the platform to sort of the latest and greatest technology, for instance. Well, that really helps both markets. There's no, you know, that is not sort of one vertical or the other.
That's the whole platform and affects both markets. If, you know, certainly going into our fiscal 2024, I would expect, and, you know, I've actually got a, an off-site strat planning meeting with our board in a couple of weeks. I, you know, I don't wanna come to any conclusions before we go through that strat planning process, but certainly all the data would support us pouring the bulk of our sales and marketing effort you know, over the next 12 to 24 months into the healthcare space.
Makes sense. Going back to healthcare, there's obviously been a lot of momentum, but are you also seeing a halo effect on the pharma side?
Are we also seeing... Sorry?
Are you also seeing any demand on the pharma side in healthcare?
Yeah, we are. Two areas actually. We are seeing some interesting demand for the in-hospital pharmacy, and the, you know, the distribution network within a hospital network for the, for pharmacy. Some of that centers around proper management of 340B, which, you know, you may know is this interesting sort of U.S. regulation that creates a very low priced sort of supply chain for pharmacy pharmaceutical products being supplied to, you know, mainly indigenous, you know, people groups. If a hospital serves a region of the country that has a significant indigenous population, then they become a 340B-licensed hospital and are allowed to buy certain drugs at much, much lower prices, and so on.
That our platform manages all that and streamlines the processing of all that and so on. That, you know, we're seeing some interest around that. In fact, I think it's this week, we have an event happening out in Seattle, where we're meeting at actually at an AWS at, you know, cloud center there, to run a sort of a pharmacy seminar. Last I heard, I think we've got eight hospital networks coming to sort of sit through the seminar and engage in sort of how they need to modernize their pharmacy supply chains and so on. We're seeing a good degree of interest in pharmacy there. We're also seeing some rising interest from the mail order pharmacy market, we'll see how that evolves.
We have one client in that market now, but if you look at the pipeline, we're starting to see some rising interest around mail order pharmacy. Which are mainly operated, those mail order pharmacy operations in the U.S., are mainly run by the big insurance companies. For drugs that are long-term sort of chronic type drugs, you know, cholesterol lowering drugs, blood pressure lowering drugs, et cetera, that you're gonna be on, you know, maybe for the rest of your life, rather than going to the pharmacy, you opt for the mail order fulfillment, and they just, you know, arrive in the mail every month kind of thing.
That business is a very significant and growing business in the U.S. market, and it looks like that may be turning into an interesting market for our pharmacy offerings as well.
Great. Thank you. That's a very helpful color. Lastly, if, you know, if you could provide any details on the IDN you added this quarter, like, how big it is and the impact you're expecting on revenue.
Yeah. I mean, it's. It was a fairly typical sized IDN. It was actually a children's hospital. You know, we're not giving out the name at this point, but it was a large children's hospital. You know, when we talk about the top 300 IDNs that we pursue, we mainly pursue IDNs that are over $1 billion in net patient revenue. You know, that is the bulk of the pipeline. It's the bulk of what we pursue, and it's the bulk of our client base. We've got a few below that, but this one was a fairly typical. It sort of fits right into your sort of average size deals.
You know, Our average size, if you look at our last sort of 12 months, a typical IDN is coming in, you know, a little north of $600,000 of annual recurring revenue. You know, that's up from sort of, you know, $350,000 or $400,000 a couple years ago. That's typically where they're coming in. Some of them come in below that, some of them come in significantly above that if they're, you know, biting off more at once. That's a pretty typical type deal.
Excellent. Thank you. That's it for me.
Great. Thank you.
Thanks.
Our next question comes line of Amr Ezzat with Echelon Wealth Partners. Please proceed.
Good morning. I just have a couple of quick ones for you on the new slides.
Okay.
Can you walk us through the SaaS margin expansion? Is that just on scale?
It is. Yeah. The projections that you see in that, in that, on that new slide in that investor deck is really based upon, you know, a certain assumed SaaS bookings growth level, which is disclosed there, and a certain, you know, a certain incremental margin level, which is also disclosed there. We wanted to lay it out in a way that was, you know, pretty evident that these are projections based upon those assumptions, but this is how the platform scales, you know, given those assumptions and where we would expect margins to go given those assumptions.
Okay. What are the costs associated against like the SaaS revenues? Would have thought that this would be like already at 80%, 90% margin.
Yeah. You're right. I mean, that's the direction, you know, it's going in that direction. As we've talked about in the past, you know, you have a core, a bunch of costs that you have to, you know, that you have to incur in order to run a 24-seven operation, you know, including, you know, security and a 24 seven-
Okay
... You know, ops team and support team. Once you build that up, you know, eventually you get to the point where you can really scale off of that, off of that base of investment. That's what we're starting to see happening, and that's what we're sort of projecting in that model.
Got it. Got it. Got it. Will you guys be breaking out your services margins in your financials going forward between SaaS and the rest of it, like maintenance and support?
You know, we're talking about that, internally, just providing more insight into that because it, you know, clearly the market, you know, the market's interested in that and that's in fact the impetus for that slide. No commitments right now. We see the, you know, we see the interest there and we wanna shine some more light on that because of that interest.
Understood. Yeah, that's very helpful. If I think at the other side of revenues, I guess, on license and hardware, is 30% margin a good number long term to use if I were to sort of project that chart for license and hardware?
You know, I mean, it's kind of a little bit of a fielder's choice there, Amr. Frankly, I mean, the PropTech stuff that we sell in hardware is typically higher margin than that. License, you know, like I said before, you know, we don't expect to have $1 million quarters. You know, I know we just had a couple, but we don't expect to have $1 million license quarters and, you know, that has, you know, the opposite effect on that net margin. You know, our third-party hardware business is, you know, that margin is down in the, you know, in the 20s%, you know, typically. It might get up to 30%, but it's kind of in that range.
The question becomes, well, how much of that mix is PropTech out there, and what does that do to the margin? You know, and how much is licensed, and what does that do to the margin? I mean, I'm giving a little bit of evasive on the, on the response here, but, you know, that's kind of why that 30% is showing up in there. If you look at the future and headwinds and tailwinds, there's headwind on that margin for declining license and there's probably some tailwind on maybe on PropTech mix.
Understood. Thanks. These are very helpful slides. I'll pass the line.
Thanks.
The next question comes from the line of Steven Li with Raymond James. Please proceed.
Thank you. Hey, Peter, Mark. I have a question on your PS. It feels like the growth has been slowing down. Is this temporary or is this more structural in that there may be more implementations is being done by your partners?
Yeah, I mean, the jury is still out on that a bit, Steven. I mean, we've been talking about what we see as kind of structural shifts, you know, happening over the last couple of quarters and believe that that is, you know, that structural shift is gonna continue. That structural shift is driven by a couple of factors. You know, one is the fact that as more and more customers, you know, and prospects choose SaaS, they wanna be more and more in line with a mainline SaaS version that, you know, that is easy to upgrade going forward. That means less custom modifications. Another thing that's driving down custom modifications, you know, which we build for, which we've historically built for.
Another thing driving down custom modifications is that, you know, healthcare customers tend to, not always, but tend to be a lower level of modifications, you know, even on our historical platform. You know, as more shifts towards healthcare, that probably also brings down the custom mod activity, you know, over time. That's custom mods being one systemic part of, you know, decreasing growth rate or moderating growth rate in professional services. The other thing is, as you mentioned, it's the partner ecosystem point. We do see that happening. We do see that as a long-term structural trend that's gonna moderate, you know, professional services growth. We think that's true in the future.
All that said, you know, what just happened in Q3 is we booked, you know, $19 million of professional services in 1 month. There's clearly some inertia there for some strong professional services revenue in the quarter and in quarters ahead. You know, we just, you know, in the results that we just put out, we, you know, we hit a total combined PS revenue level of sort of mid $13 million, you know, about $13.5 million. We think we have capacity to drive, you know, probably $1 million on top of that number with our existing team in the short term.
With that CAD 19 million of backlog, that CAD 38 million of backlog driven by that CAD 19 million of bookings in Q3, you know, we kind of expect that, you know, there's gonna be some PS revenue growth, you know, coming in the quarter and quarters ahead.
Got it. I guess, if I take your capacity for another million, does that mean when you look at your PS organization, I mean, what is the kind of utilization you're running at? Like, is it above 90%?
Yeah, no, not, nowhere near 90%. You know, nobody could run a PS organization at, you know, at that kind of a level for any kind of sustainable time. I mean, we sort of shoot for something like, you know, if we can be around, you know, really broad terms in the sixties, I think you're really at a very strong utilization level that's, you know, that's sustainable.
Some of that comes down to the fact. Sorry, I was just gonna say some of that comes down to the fact that different companies sometimes talk about utilization levels in different ways, you know. You know, some sort of score their utilization out of 1,500 hours a year because 1,400 hours a year because they've already taken out, you know, vacation and education time and sick days and, you know, you name it. You know, others score it. We score it in very simple terms, you know, literally total number of working hours in a year, you know, how many of those hours are billable. It, you know. I know there's differences across industry in terms of how people score.
Typically, the way we score sort of industry best in class tends to hit, as Mark says, the sort of the mid-60s up to maybe 70. It tends to mean that in a, you know, in a crunch, you can rev that all the way up to the low 80s. The low 80s are not sustainable. You'll, you know, your people would just get too tired running at that pace. If you've got a bunch of go lives all happening the same month, you might get up into the low 80s, but your average over any extended period of time is gonna be, you know, quite a bit lower than that.
Got it. Thanks. Thanks, guys.
Thanks for the question, Steve.
Mr. Brereton, there are no other questions, so I'll turn the call back over to you.
Great. Well, thank you, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. As always, if you have any additional questions, feel free to reach out to Mark or I. Otherwise, we'll look forward to talking to you again at the end of Q4. Q4, of course, has our audit to follow. The actual release of numbers we would expect to be around the end of June. Look forward to talking to you then. Thanks. Bye for now.
Thank you. That does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your lines. Have a great day.