Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Kristian Talvitie from PTC, CFO. Thanks again for joining us. I think we've done this—I don't know how many years—many, many years. Even before you, when you were back at PTC, and then you left, and now you're back, we go back quite a ways.
Quite a ways.
There we go. All right. Let's get started. By the way, I will save some time at the end if there are questions from the group. If, Matt, you want to ask the question that nobody's asking, too, that you think is worth asking, that's fun, too.
Wait, just before you get into the questions, my general counsel likes to listen to these, and I would be remiss—I would get scolded for not reminding everybody that there could be forward-looking statements and that there are risk factors. Please refer to our SEC filings and our press releases and other materials to understand us.
Okay. You're gonna update guidance today? Is that what you're saying?
I'm just doing my corporate duty.
We can do something with that.
Yeah.
I don't know where it's—live mics—oh, there we go. There we go. All right. Let's get into this. You know, it—boy, it feels like, you know, we've been talking about uneven macros for—I don't know—when was there ever, like, a good macro for you? It feels like a long time ago, doesn't it? I don't—I don't know when the last.
2022 compared to 2021, I think, was a pretty good.
That was good. Okay, that was good macros. Okay. And it feels like it's very intermittent. Yeah, you guys continue to deliver solid double-digit growth, and driven by sort of, obviously, PLM, but CAD and some of the newer stuff here. You know, maybe just level-set us, you know, in terms of what you're seeing out there now. You know, the business has been remarkably durable despite all the uncertainties out there. Just, like, what are you—you guys just reported a week or so ago. You know, just refresh us. What are you seeing out there today? What are you excited about, you know, over the next 12 months as you enter into the fiscal year?
Yeah, there's a lot packed in there. You know, I mean, I think from an overall macro standpoint, we've been pretty consistent in commenting that it remains—it has been and remains, kind of a sluggish selling environment.
Yeah.
You know, I don't—we haven't seen—we haven't seen that really change here in, I don't know, eight quarters. And, you know, in the meantime, we do continue to see interest build as evidenced by, you know, pipeline growing over that period, which I, you know, I think is positive. You know, I think that the solutions that we have, and what I'm excited about, and not just for the next 12 months, but, you know, even beyond, seem to be in a, you know, in a spot where the companies that we're serving are looking to make changes. They're looking to, you know, digitally transform their businesses to be able to leverage that, you know, core information—core engineering information more broadly outside of engineering. And, ultimately, what it boils down to for our customers is increasing their competitiveness in the markets that they compete in.
You know, they are leaning on technologies that we are bringing to market to, you know, help them do that.
Yeah.
That part's the exciting part. You know, in the meantime, I guess I'd just follow on in terms of the business performance. You know, I think that, as you'll remember, and I was just talking with somebody earlier, you know, the business from 2015 to 2020 went through a pretty important transition.
Yep.
Changing the commercial model from a perpetual model to a subscription model. Still largely on-premises delivery, but a subscription, commercial model. And, you know, that has made a significant difference in how the business behaves, in more turbulent times. It's much more stable, much more steady. We've been, kind of fine-tuning, you know, the commercial aspects of the business, over the past few years as well, which continues to—continues to help and provide some of that stability in this kind of environment.
Yeah. The other change, obviously, is, Neil, from over the last year. You worked with Jim. I worked with Jim for many, many years. You know, as you reflect back on the last year, there's been a lot of change. What has positively surprised you about Neil and some of his decisions that he's made? Because there's been a lot of go-to-market changes. There's been just a general, I think, philosophy on the business. Talk about some of the most important things you think Neil has brought to the business.
Yeah. I, you know, I mean, I think, Neil comes very much with a customer-first mindset, you know, and he's been spending a lot of time out on the road, with customers, with the, you know, 7,000+ employees that we have around the world, trying to really make sure that he understands what the customer pain points are, and trying to bring that back and, you know, assess whether or not we're organized as effectively as we could be and spending as effectively as we could be to, to really address some of those main, you know, pain points as he's hearing them from, from customers. I think you see that take shape in, you know, even the way that he talks about the business, and he talks about five priorities and, you know, ALM and PLM and SLM and CAD.
SaaS is a kind of foundational, you know, technology, underpinning for delivery model change. But, you know, that's reflective of what he's hearing from the customer base.
Yeah.
He's bringing that back, and he's trying to make sure that the business is focused on delivering those pieces. It's not to say that we're not actually still, you know, investing, for example, in Onshape and Arena, what we call our velocity business unit. They're doing okay. They serve kind of a different part of the market, and they've been performing okay for our retail business segment, for example. Or even, you know, the IoT and AR stuff, those are still valuable technologies in an industrial setting. He's just trying to make sure that they're all focused around delivering on the core.
Yeah.
and, and so, you know, I think that is, you know, that's something that he's been, he's been bringing to the organization. We've seen it, in a couple of moves that have been made. you know, the IoT and kind of AR rebalancing that we talked about, which was really, you know, taking folks that were working over here and actually putting them on to, you know, things where we thought we needed, as Neil likes to say, more, more wood behind the arrow. and, you know, the go-to-market realignment that we talked about on the call now.
Yeah.
That's just another step, really, in that direction. It's around, you know, focus, and, you know, focus and then driving execution.
I think, you know, we talked that night of your call, and it struck me that, like, the vertical-oriented salesforce makes just so much sense to me. In fact, I was like, I thought we—like, why—why didn't we do this, like, five years ago? Right? You know, talk about, like, you know, the both—I, I, you know, I'd like to focus on both the potential risks that you've assumed in guidance, but also, like, what, what could the benefits of that—because it just seems so logical, right, to an outside observer. I almost took it for granted that you guys already were organized that way.
Yeah. That's a great question. I would say, you know, we chose the words go-to-market realignment pretty specifically.
Yeah.
It's not—it's not just a sales, we'll say, realignment.
Yes.
You know, I think about it more as an evolution than a revolution. Meaning you're right. Just naturally, over the years, I would tell you that, you know, the salesforce, the sales folks that we had kind of developed into pods. You know, we had a—or have an automotive pod in Germany and an FA&D pod in, you know, in the U.S. It was never, you know, a formal structure. That is just the primary quota carrying rep whose job is really to understand the customers, the markets that they're playing in, what their opportunities are.
They're not actually the, the technical experts that are then going to actually help the customer understand how Windchill or Codebeamer is, is actually going to help them from a technical perspective, let alone if they make a purchase decision, how it's going to get implemented and, you know, how they're going to deploy it across the enterprise. When we talk about go-to-market realignment, it's more of a formalization, around, you know, even the, you know, the sales reps, but also the entire supporting organization behind that. The customer success organization, for example, and the pre-sales and post-sales technical resources that we have to do what I just talked about, and the marketing organization, as well to get focused around, around these verticals so that, you know, the automotive group is.
Yeah.
Singularly focused on automotive, and they're getting automotive messaging from marketing. When the automotive customer wants to talk to some of the technical resources, they've dealt with primarily other automotive resources and can understand their problems and see how it's been deployed other places and where areas that they need to watch out for crop up, and they're able to actually just better help the customer. Then within that realignment as well, I would say there's also been a shifting of resources. We did some thinning out of management layers and also a reduction of, we'll say, non-technical resources, particularly on the CS side, and have been bolstering that back up, you know, which our customers are asking for. Frankly, if you were a sales rep, you'd say, "I've been asking for this too".
Yeah.
There is a lot of goodness, I think, that comes out of it and comes out of the structure and the more formalized approach. That is why I also say it is more of an evolution than a revolution.
Yeah. It—I mean, you outlined some of the, the potential positives in this change. You know, when you thought about the year's guidance, how did you—you know, because there's obviously, you know, room for disruption when this thing happened. How, how did you sort of handicap that when you thought about your, your four-year ARR guide?
Yeah. I think that so there's potential for disruption when we're moving accounts. That is going to happen, kind of around the fringes. For example, I'll take, just as a random example, a fictitious example of somebody who was in the automotive pod. They may have been at PTC for 10 years, and they may have a handful of accounts, and most of them are automotive, but they may have picked up a medtech account or an industrial account along the way years back. We want to put those into the right home. In that account transfer, there could be some disruption. We'll also do what we can to try to mitigate it, meaning if you're nine months deep into a Windchill campaign.
You're not going to.
We're not going to move that now.
Probably. Yeah.
If you're two months into it, we probably will move it. We also try to make sure that there's, you know, incentive, for you to do that as quickly as possible. Plus, you're probably getting a couple new accounts that we want you to build pipeline with, and you should be excited to do that with, as well. That certainly creates some, you know, some opportunity for, for disruption. We try to be mindful of that, as we, as we thought about the guidance, guidance for the year.
It sounds like, from what I'm hearing and what we talked about when you guys reported, was that you were thoughtful on the potential ARR disruption. If there's stuff that's in flight, you know, we're not going to touch that piece, and we'll let that piece kind of close where it originated. Hopefully, that could mitigate some of that handoff risk for late-stage deals. That's great to hear. Maybe pivoting to some of the business lines. You guys have been growing PLM well above market growth rates for years now. I don't—it feels like you've been growing double -digits for, I don't—I don't know how—years. You know, how durable is that? Because that, you know, that, you know, some are—you know, you've had a lot of success with Windchill and obviously Windchill + now. Talk about the durability of that growth.
When you think about that multi-year CAGR growth, how important and how reliable is that double-digit growth within PLM?
Yeah. I mean, going back to the beginning comments, even around some of what Neil was hearing when he was out talking to customers and the pressures that they're facing in their own markets and the need to digitize their businesses. You know, digital transformation is a journey. It's not a destination. It's not like you deploy it once across the entire organization, and then it's done and you're gone. That's just not how companies really deploy it. They usually will start with one department and expand into another and then come back later and expand into another. You know, all the while, we're investing pretty heavily to try to, you know, improve the product, improve UI/UX, as well as improve integrations.
You know, between Windchill and ServiceMax, for example, and between Windchill and Codebeamer, you know, as another example.
Yeah.
It can create this opportunity for additional need and additional use cases and additional value for the customers. You know, we think that the opportunity remains very interesting. I can't think of a customer that I would say is, you know, tapped out in terms of.
Yeah.
opportunity.
From the go-to-market change, are there any things that you guys are doing from a cross-sell incentive to incentivize salespeople to even focus even more so now that they're vertically oriented to sell Codebeamer than they were before? Is there anything unique with the cross-sell go-to-market motion this year that you think could benefit from the new go-to-market focus?
I think what you would find is that in different verticals, certain, of the, we'll call it cross-sellable products, have more interest than others.
Yeah.
at any, you know, we'll call it point in time. You know, right now, for example, Codebeamer in automotive is, is pretty interesting.
Yeah.
That group is sharing amongst themselves.
Sure.
Hearing from those customers, and by the way, we're seeing that, you know, in other highly regulated industries, you know, medtech, for example, and even A&D. In others, there's, you know, the opportunity for, for example, ServiceMax and ServiceMax cross-sell. By the way, in the industrial segment, you know, that's an example there where we've seen some good cross-sell happening. I think, while there isn't an explicit, we'll call it quota incentive to do that, there are natural tendencies that are poor.
Yeah. You know, thinking about PLM and just kind of, you know, your broad portfolio, you've been outgrowing peers pretty consistently just so , in particular. I'm curious, you know, there's been some changes in the broader competitive landscape. Siemens is, is rumored, or I think a rumor is, it's confirmed. They're, they're buying Altair. They're in the process. Synopsys is, is, is trying to buy Ansys or, Ansys. Does that, does that change the competitive dynamic? You know, I know you were a better partner with Ansys. You were a good partner with Ansys historically. I don't know if.
Still are.
Was your partnership with Altair also? Did you have one there?
No. We had the commercial relationship was really with,
With Ansys?
With Ansys and still is with.
With Ansys? Does any of that change in the future? It's hard to say.
It's hard to say. I would struggle to understand why it would.
Okay.
you know, I mean, they have an awesome product.
Yeah.
Servicing, in many cases, a lot of the same kinds of customers that we're servicing, across the product development cycle. You know, you need CAD and PLM. You need simulation.
Yeah.
And so, in that sense, I'm not sure why it would.
Why that would change. Does Siemens, does Siemens become a more formidable competitor if they have Altair, as a kind of more CAD, CAD PLM competitor with sort of a tighter integrated simulation tool?
I guess it remains to be seen. But, you know, I mean, I guess at the same time, I would look at. There's another competitor in the market that has simulation as well as CAD and PLM.
Yeah.
You know, we seem to be doing pretty well against them in that, you know, with the PLM offering that we have.
Yeah. Not, although there's been a bunch of moving pieces, you don't think it really changes the, at this point, it's hard to say, but you don't see anything on the horizon where it's not going to, yeah, keep an eye on this. Okay. What about CAD, with Creo +? You know, it seems like Windchill+ gets a lot of the attention. Talk about the success of Creo+ and what that could mean for that long-term growth algorithm.
Yeah. I think Creo+ is still, we'll say, in the very early innings.
Yeah.
If I was to look for a proof point on whether there is interest for CAD, SaaS application, I would actually look at Onshape right now.
Yep.
which actually continues to have pretty good success. And by the way, those wins are all competitive takeaways from other competitors that are on-prem or even trying to move to a more hybrid model. I would say I think that's, you know, indicative of, you know, what we're seeing there moving up market, getting kind of larger customers. So, you know, clearly there is interest in SaaS. Now, as it relates to Creo+ or some of the other competitive products that are out there, that's a long path for customers to go down. I ultimately believe they will. It's a better delivery model than an on-prem delivery model. It's going to happen. It's, I think, just a question of time.
Yeah. Yeah. The other, you know, the idiosyncratic element that I really like about PTC is, is, when you think about ServiceMax and the cross-sell, how would you grade your performance on ServiceMax thus far? Realizing it's still relatively early in the portfolio, it feels to me like there's this huge cross-sell opportunity. I know we sort of want to be balanced in when we think that could play out. How would you grade the performance thus far of ServiceMax and kind of the integration efforts?
Sure. I would say I think the, you know, the integration, you could put it into many different buckets. The, without sounding disparaging, but some of the less value-add, integration back-office systems and everything that, has actually gone, smoothly. And then I would say some of the more important parts, of the integration, I would put, into, the, the people part and bringing those people on board , and getting them integrated into the broader ecosystem. You know, I think that, actually has gone really well. Obviously, Neil, the CEO, was the CEO of ServiceMax.
Yeah.
He's now CEO of PTC. You know, there are other folks at different levels of the ServiceMax organization that have really, you know, embedded themselves within broader PTC, which I think is great. You know, that's with any software company, important asset is the people. And I think we've been doing a good job integrating there. Lastly, you know, I would put on the product front, and, you know, again, we have just completed an integration with Windchill and ServiceMax. I think there's, you know, more opportunity still on the product front. Of course, the go-to-market synergies, and that's really leveraging, if you will, the core PTC salesforce and the core PTC customer base and getting ServiceMax opportunities in front of those customers.
We have seen some interesting success stories there, as well.
Yeah.
You know, Neil would tell you there are customers that they, they've been knocking on the door for years, and they could never get in as kind of standalone ServiceMax. Now, as part of the broader PTC, they've been able to get in. I mean, all in all, I think it's still early innings. You know, unfortunately, just given the timing, the macro.
Yeah.
was not really cooperative. You know, I think there's, I think there's still opportunity for continued improvement. I think, in general, it's done well.
I guess the question is, like, it just seems so logical for a PTC Windchill customer to, like, it just seems like hand in glove in some regards. What, if you're not using ServiceMax, what are these customers using from an SLM perspective?
A lot of them are using either homegrown systems, you know, whether that's a system they've built themselves, Excel spreadsheets, sticky notes.
Yeah. You see a lot of that still.
You see a lot of that. You know, there are a couple of competitive solutions out in the market. We really probably narrowed down to one primary.
Yeah.
That is kind of the market opportunity. I also agree that a lot of these companies actually think about their service operations, you know, as actual profit centers for their business. This is a way to really enhance both the customer experience but also improve their service delivery and the profitability of their service delivery, you know, by investing in tools like.
Yeah.
Like ServiceMax. I agree with you. The long-term fit, I think, is, I think is great. And then ultimately, being able to tie some of that service information back into Windchill and get that back into.
Yeah.
You know, the core engineering departments, I think, is also a very good upside for them.
I'm going to ask another question, and then we'll see if there's one from the group. You know, I, your confidence on free cash flow has always been high, just from a, you know, relative to other aspects of your guidance. Talk to us about, and I know in the past you've said, like, you know, even at the low end of our ARR range, I feel comfortable with sort of the midpoint of the free cash flow range. Is there any sort of, like, commentary like that that you have this year of, of sort of that confidence? I know there were some moving parts this year on, on free cash flow relative to last year. Any thoughts on the confidence level of free cash flow with, even though ARR can, can move around a little bit?
I still feel good about it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, in a odd way, and, you know, for folks who don't necessarily follow the company too closely, because of ASC 606 and revenue recognition and our, the vast majority of our software delivery is still doing on-prem, ASC 606 actually kind of wreaks havoc on the P&L, which renders it effectively useless as a management tool. You know, what we've really migrated to, as oddly as it sounds, is running the business on a cash basis. Because it's all consistent, cash inflows, all subscription-based cash inflows are primarily, and most of the outflows are consistent.
Yeah.
Subscription-like outflows, whether it's rent or, you know, salaries or any of the tools that we use.
Yeah.
You know, that's the, the ends up being how, how we look at the business. As such, it's put a much greater focus for us on that. And we've fine-tuned many processes around that to make sure that, to make sure that we understand what's happening from a cash flow perspective.
Yeah.
Because that's how we manage the business. That's how we make incremental investment decisions, you know, etc., etc. It actually worked out, worked out pretty well, I think.
That's great. Is there any from the group here? I think he's going.
Don't ask about my mustache .
It is November. It's just top-notch. It's generally white herb. Yeah. It was.
Just a question on the ServiceMax Windchill integration that you mentioned. Is that something that you think customers have been, or prospective customers have been waiting for that could be a catalyst as we head into 2025 and beyond?
I think it will be helpful. I think it will, you know, help bring to life for customers, you know, the digital thread concept, which is kind of our marketing message for leveraging that core engineering data out of engineering more broadly throughout the organization and then back from the organization, you know, into engineering, where if there is a problem, it can actually be solved at the source. I think that that will for sure help be a proof point, you know, for that digital thread concept for customers, and an incremental positive.
We've got about 90 seconds left. Matt, I'm going to say, is there—no, you didn't have it. If we're sitting here this time next year and you guys end up throwing 12%-13%, what's the most likely reason for the—and macro, I'm sure, you know, let's just hold macro constant. Is there something you'd say a lot like this, you know, I feel really good about, like, this, this could actually be a lot better than what we're, you know, kind of thinking?
I mean, there are various aspects of it, but I, you know, I mean, I think that seeing some of the growth initiatives that we're trying to drive across the company taking hold, in this example, you know, maybe early on.
Yeah.
which would be the go-to-market transformation, which is really talking about the kind of the, the core direct business. you know, we're also working with our channel partners to try and make sure that we're driving growth there and enabling, enabling growth there. If those things start to take hold in a, you know, it would be a, a favorable macro.
Yeah.
Would be a preferable backdrop. You know, those are the things that I think could continue to, you know, drive performance.
Is there any, is there any, you know, with this talk of tariffs now, are your customers thinking about that, especially the ones that are, you know, outside the U.S.?
I think they're thinking about it, but I think it's also still early because it is.
Yeah. Yeah.
At this point, just talk. I think they're still.
It's not, they're thinking about it, but they're not, they're not necessarily contemplating it yet in terms of, like, their end markets yet.
Yeah.
Okay. Excellent. We're out of time, unfortunately. But Kristian , thank you. And Matt, thank you for coming as well. Best of luck, guys.
Matt, thanks for having us. Always appreciate the opportunity.