Good morning, everybody. My name is Joe Ritchie. I cover the industrial conglomerates. I actually run our industrials and materials business unit for Goldman. I'm really happy today to have Roper Technologies with us. We've got Neil Hunn, President and CEO, as well as Jason Conley, the CFO. I will open it up to questions as we go through the session, but just to maybe kick things off, Neil, why don't you tell us just a little bit about what makes Roper special? We'll talk about you know, just for folks that are new to the story here, help folks understand how the business model compounds cash over time.
Yeah, appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for having us. Yeah, Roper is a bit of a unique story for this conference. You know, we have our industrial heritage, we've shed that part of our business. We're now 75% vertical market software and 25% technology-enabled products. And the lens that we filter our strategy through, and our operating methods, and our governance through is, what is the stability of our long-term, durable, sort of multi-generational cash flow compounding? You know, we have a algorithm today that spits out sort of mid-teens cash flow compounding durably over decades. We're working, and I'm sure we'll talk about it today, how we can improve that over time by a little bit. We're about a $7 billion business. We're comprised of 28 independent operating businesses.
We run a very decentralized operating structure, which I'm sure we'll come on to why and some of the intricacies of that. At the same time, we run a very centralized capital deployment. So about, you know, 50%-60% of our cash flow compounding is organic, the balance is through our capital deployment lens. The vast majority of our capital deployment or capital allocation is to M&A and capital deployment. We pay a small but growing dividend, and create a lot of value on both sides of that flywheel, both the organic and the inorganic side. So I'm sure we'll get into that in detail.
Yeah. So a lot of jumping off points there, Neil, but why don't we just talk about that decentralized strategy?
Why is that the right strategy for your business model? And just maybe give some examples on how that's been successful for you in the past.
Delighted to do it. I think it starts with the nature of our companies, right? Because really, our org structure and our strategy follows, and governance follows from that. So the twenty-eight businesses, well, if you look at our website, you'll see an eclectic mix of end markets, from healthcare IT, to media entertainment, to insurance tech, to gov tech, to ed tech, to a large number to transportation tech. And the end markets are eclectic. The core attributes of all twenty-eight businesses are identical. So all of our businesses are leaders. So the principal thing all twenty of our businesses do, we are the demonstrable leader in our market, number one. Number two, we prefer and are highly attracted to smaller TAMs. They're wildly protective, right? So, it's very rare we have a new entrant.
But also, we love the small TAMs, 'cause when you're the leader, you compete on this notion that we call customer intimacy. Our customers want us to win, they need us to win. We're mission-critical to their operation. Our customers cannot do what they do without our software, and so we compete on this intimacy quotient. That gets to our org structure. So while we're the largest in small markets, the one thing we know definitionally is all of our competitors are smaller players, and they have one thing for sure, which is a speed coefficient. So we have to have an organizational structure that allows our companies to operate at or above that speed coefficient, so we're wildly decentralized. Roughly 18,000 or 19,000 people in the organization, about 100 at the corporate center, and we have 28s of everything.
We have twenty-eight leadership teams, strategies, operating strategies, ERPs, for instance. And so it. And the final thing about our org structure that is super powerful is there's single point accountability. There's nowhere to hide in an organization. If one of our companies is doing well, they can look in the mirror and sort of be proud of themselves and their team. If they're not doing well, they can't point their fingers except in the mirror. There's not a dollar allocated above EBITDA to any of our businesses, so it's clean P&Ls and balance sheets every month, so that single point accountability is super impactful. Great examples of where it works, I mean, it's almost like pick a company and pick a quarter.
You know, I mean, probably the best example of our org structure, just doing what it needs to do and acting nimbly, goes back to COVID. You know, when the world was shutting down, nobody is looking to the corporate office for direction. They're sort of listening to their customers, they're listening to their employees, they're making decisions on what to do, and then letting us know, and then we're seeing pattern recognition and sort of accelerating that. It could be simple things, like a couple of our companies, whether it's Northern Digital or Foundry, so medical products business or media entertainment, they, on their own strategy, make very hard choice to stop doing something so they can have the resources to fund what is the most important growth driver.
Or in Aderant case, our legal software business, you know, they had done a great job of going from 30% to 50% or 55% market share organically, and they're the ones saying, "Okay, how do I continue my growth over a long arc of time?" And they're working on their strategy about how you change the nature of the strategy from a ground game and land grab game to now, how do I really drive my innovation engine for cross-selling, upselling? So and it's... There's 28 examples of that, but it is, I think, the sort of the secret weapon of Roper's competitive advantage is the org structure and the autonomy, and the accountability that comes with it, is... And we're committed to this structure.
Neil, that was super helpful, and you touched on some of the businesses. I recall when I first started covering Roper over a decade ago that the business and the portfolio has evolved a ton.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe, maybe just talk about some of the changes that have been made and where you think the portfolio is going from here.
Sure, so I think it's important to, when we talk about the change, I think we should talk about what's not changing as well, and what's not changing is a lot of what I just covered, right, and so the nature and the profile of the businesses and the assets that we have in the portfolio, and we target to acquire, are all the same. Leaders, small markets, compete on intimacy, high recurring revenues, high gross net retention, very asset light. We're able to importantly capture value in the products that we sell, so we have high gross margins, which enable sort of the ability to invest in the business and drive increased operating margins over time and high cash flow margins. Those have been durable for 25 years... What's changed is a couple things.
You know, three, two and a half years ago, two years or so ago, we made a decision to exit the cyclical part of our portfolio. As I mentioned at the onset, about 40% of our 2018 revenue, we decided it was deeply cyclical, it was industrial in nature, project nature, and so we divested those businesses and redeployed that into slightly higher growth, but meaningfully lower cyclicality. I think, and Jason will have to fact-check me, in 2016-ish, about 50% of our revenue was cyclical.
Today, we'd argue none, essentially none of it, so we really beat the cyclicality out. There are other side benefits that occurred when we did that. It became more growthy, it became more recurring, and it became more asset light, and so the quality of the enterprise improved dramatically. So that was a portfolio change. And then what we've sort of worked on in the last handful of years is two things. I mean, we're focused on just a small number of things that are high impact. At the enterprise level, it's two things. It's one, how do we drive more organic growth into the portfolio? And we've done a decent job of that over the last five years. This portfolio was a five and a half or six % organic growth portfolio.
We believe today it's in the seven, seven and a half range, sort of current course and speed over a longer time, and the art of the possible is in the mid eights for this portfolio. And so we can get into that to the extent about what we're doing and the methods and means. That's durable organic growth rates. And the second thing is capture more value from our capital deployment. And so we've demonstrably pivoted our capital deployment to do more bolt-on activity, so we can drive more organic growth into the portfolio once the thing we acquire becomes organic, and buy things that are a little bit more growthy. And so Procare is an example of that, where it's... I'm sure we can come onto that later.
Our growth profile increased, but also the returns will of our capital deployment are in the neighborhood of 30%+ better when we do bolt-ons or buy things that are a little bit more growthy versus our prior sort of capital deployment strategy.
Yeah, we'll, we'll dig into the organic growth in a second, but just on the portfolio evolution, you still have about a quarter of your business that is still product centric, tied to medical and water products.
What's the future of that piece of your portfolio? Could that be something that you look to divest over the medium term?
Yeah, I would just take you back to the guiding principle when we went through our strategy work and our board discussions was to get a portfolio that did not exhibit cyclicality in its revenue stream. That's the guiding principle, and then that's our strategy, and this portfolio has performed well in that regard. The decision we chose not to do, you know, a handful of years, three or four years ago, was become a software-only company. Our strategy so far has worked. There has been a modest portfolio rerate on the valuation based on beating the cyclicality out of the business, and so this is the portfolio.
Now, ultimately, over time, I mean, it takes, when you've studied other companies that have done portfolio transformations akin to the one we have done, there's at least two very good examples in the marketplace we could learn from. It takes a handful of years for the investors to sort of say, "It's not on the promise that the quality is better, it's on the actual delivery that the quality is better." So we need to see and let this portfolio season before we sort of make another decision.
Okay. Makes sense. So you talked a little bit about everybody being... those twenty-eight leaders being accountable. The governance process, I think, is something that is unique to Roper. Just talk about a little bit how that governance process works and what you're essentially incentivizing-
Mm-hmm
... each of your leaders to, to achieve every year.
Sure. So I think this has been a pretty demonstrable step forward for us in the last five or six years in terms of the way we select our leaders to run the twenty-eight businesses and the way we govern, and incent. Let me sort of unpack those two or three things. First, on the leadership selection process, I think it's important, I mean, let me step back.
Six years ago, I became CEO, and believe it or not, the mandate to our operating leaders from my predecessor was, "Just, just protect your business, don't go backwards and give us all the capital so we can redeploy it into the best and highest use." So that actually gets translated by most of the leaders as, "Okay, I'll do that, but I don't have to grow." Having grown up on the operating side of this business, I mean, every business I had responsibility for, there was lots of opportunity to grow.
And so the first thing we needed to do was profile the leaders that were growing and get the very common set of behavioral attributes that worked well within the Roper context, because we knew we were going to have to do a fair amount of changing of the leadership to get more growth oriented. So it came down to four things. One is our best leaders are hypercompetitive. They're ridiculously, insanely competitive, they want to win. Second is they have an enormous quotient of growth mindset or intellectual curiosity. So I think a lethal combination is you're competitive and curious, you're always wanting to get better, it is a lethal combination in terms of innate attributes of leaders. The third one, in our case, is we needed, we call strategic operators.
In smaller businesses, and our meat of our portfolio is a ± $250 million business . In smaller businesses, you know, what happens is the tyranny of the urgent tends to overwhelm the management teams. So what I mean by that is you have an employee quit or a bad product release, or a customer's griping about something, and then you get consumed in that short-termism. And the very best leaders that could grow can sort of filter that out, allow the daily work, if you will, that set of activity, to be done by the team that is committed to solving the daily work, and the leadership teams can take the long-term strategy and make it urgent, the execution against that urgent today. So we call that a strategic operator.
And then finally, in the Roper context, we have an enormous advantage over most of our competitors, which is we have duration advantage. We own businesses forever, and we very much need to take advantage of the duration advantage, and so we need leaders who are authentically geeked up to build their businesses... like build the underlying processes for repeatability. It takes years to do this, and so a lot of leadership teams can put heat and light on something and drive improvement. We must improve our pipeline. We must improve booking conversion, and put heat and light on that for a year, and it happens. But as soon as you take the heat and light off of that, and you go do something else, this sort of degrades. And so we're not a heat and light - we don't want heat and light managers.
We want managers who are like, "Okay, where are the underlying root causes for why we don't have enough pipeline? And let's attack those root causes, problem solve them, and build repeatability, so that when that problem is solved, you go on to the next one. This one continues to improve and get better." So there's four attributes: competitor, learner, long-term thinker, short-term operator, and builder. So that's our profile of our leader, and about half of our leaders we had to change out from the non-growthy era of Roper to the more growthy era of Roper.
That's super interesting. That's a good segue into the previous statement you made earlier about 6% organic growth business in 2024-
That's right.
getting to 7%, 7.5%, 8%. So what are gonna what are the steps that make you confident?
Yeah
... that you're gonna get to 8%?
Yeah, so let me round it out. Also, to the prior question, I think the incentives are part of it, right? And so, we incent everybody the same way, which is to grow EBITDA organically. We don't pay on budgets, and we don't pay based on plans. This is a very unique thing in the world of corporate governance and compensation, in our view. So if we did end up paying people based on a budget or a plan, then we would give all twenty-eight of our companies an incentive to lie to us, and we would have a filter not to believe anything they say, 'cause the budget process is just a negotiation for compensation. In our case, our businesses have growth hurdles. They have a low growth and a high growth hurdle.
Once those goalposts are established, they do not move. So if a company is able to increase its growth rate from five to six to seven to 10%, they make more money, and if, let's say, they stay at 10%, they're making a lot of money into perpetuity. We're not saying, "Oh, you're a 10% growth business. We're gonna shift your goalposts." So there's this inherent trust. We're totally aligned with our shareholders. Everybody in the organization is aligned, paid on growth, but more so, it's a cultural commentary.
So now, in April, when Jason gets a phone call or I get a phone call that something's not going well, where if it was a budget-based compensation process, all of us are going: "Okay, it's just-- They're calling him to get budget relief, so they can get paid." Now, it's like, there's an authentic problem. Let's figure out how we can swarm the problem and help solve it, because we're all sort of incented for growth. So it's this combination of the profile of the leaders, the incentive system, and the single point accountability and autonomous structure. The combination of that is why we're sort of able to drive this growth rate higher. Now, to your question you just asked, the way that we sort of go from where we are, seven, seven and a half, to mid eights, and this is-- there's no quick fix here.
I mean, it is. 'Cause we're building, and in repeatability, there's no quick way to get there, so it's over the course of a few years. It really comes down to each business uniquely sort of dealing with where they are. So we have a methodology of how we like to see the businesses built. The first part of the methodology is every business has to do strategy well, and small businesses didn't grow up by doing strategy well. They grew up because they had a great product market fit and just exploiting that product market fit. So now, as we're asking our businesses to grow even further, they have to find adjacencies that are logical. They have to think about different methods and means of go-to-market or product strategies.
And so we work deeply with them on two questions: where to play and how to win, and then optimizing on the notion of right to win. So all of our businesses, we want them to invest their resources at the highest right to win option they have. That's the first thing. The second thing is, we have deep operating capabilities about the repeatability of how you implement strategy. That goes to what I just talked about, the heat and light versus the building, and increasingly, a continuous improvement mindset. Then finally, very, very, very few companies have a true talent, long-term competitive advantage to running a talent offense. Like, I can think of, like, two. Every company says they want to do it, very few can, because it's just incredibly hard. How do you hire A talent and not settle for B talent?
How do you really have a B talent player, and you say, "There's so much opportunity cost for this B talent that's getting the job done, but if I get an A-plus talent, then it goes to the next level"? How do you sort of get the employees engaged, not happy, per se, engaged? And if they're engaged, they're gonna like their job, they're gonna be happy. But how do you get their incremental mind share? And ultimately, how do you create career paths and development opportunities, and you're running authentic talent, talent offense? So between strategy, strategy enablement, and team and talent, that's sort of the methods, but it's all wrapped in the, again, the single point accountability, the mindset, and innate capabilities of our leaders and this incentive system.
Yeah, that's great. I'm gonna open it up to questions in a second. We've been talking a lot about your business model, governance, organic growth profile. We haven't talked about M&A.
Mm-hmm.
And I would imagine for a lot of technology-focused investors, your M&A principles are unique.
Mm-hmm.
So, maybe just talk through the process that you go in identifying candidates. How do you view the pipeline today, and then how you think about that long-term growth algorithm-
Sure
... to help you compound?
Okay, so M&A for us is an innate capability. It's something we've honed, and we continue to improve on. Very much a learning organization in this regard over twenty years. What it starts with is we're, and it's super liberating for Jason, myself, and the leadership team that's on the Roper Ownership Committee, in terms of making our allocation decisions and investment ownership decisions, is we're not trying to build the biggest fill-in-the-blank company, the biggest, you know, tech business, transportation tech business or healthcare IT business, and so we are dispassionate about each individual investment opportunity that presents itself, but which enables us to be insanely disciplined to our criteria, and the criteria are the ones we've already talked about. Small markets, leaders, compete on intimacy.
I won't go through them all, but that is the profile of the asset we are. That's just what we do. It's unlike most other software companies. It is a remarkably instrumented process for us, where our process is much more akin to that of private equity. We have people that go out and develop relationships with sellers. We have people that develop relationships with the companies themselves. We meet on Mondays for several hours, going through the pipeline, the near-term deals, going through the in-process deals. You know, it's not uncommon for us to have, you know, 15 or 20 things in some degree in flight. You know, not like detailed, like end-stage diligence on 20 things, but it is. It's always a lot of activity going on.
You know, being somewhat of a prolific vertical market software acquirer, $25 billion or so over the last decade, we see most things, but we also invest in the relationships. And so it's very much, it's not an ad hoc thing. It's very, we're very patient, we're very disciplined to our criteria, and we just aren't going to stray from it, because we understand, as a company and leadership team, we're only as good as the last deal. It's not a portfolio approach, like two work, five are average, and two don't work. It's like everyone has to work, and so that's why we stay so instrumented and disciplined. Would you like to add?
Yeah. I'd just add that some of the changes over the years has been to expand our appetite for bolt-ons, as Neil mentioned. So historically, we would do maybe 10% of our capital employed would be in bolt-ons. It's been a lot higher the last couple of years, and we, you know, we'd love for it to be about a third of our capital employed, just because it typically increase-- it will increase the organic growth rate of the platform that it's going to be bolted onto, because it's usually, you know, a product add that we can put through our distribution channel, or we're going to get some synergies out of it, so it's our best returning deals.
And to that end, we've made some investments with some investment partners, what they're calling them, we're calling them, and they are going to be cultivating relationships, helping our platform businesses think about their inorganic strategy, and really just reaching in further into the market a little earlier, so that we can get those earlier looks at bolt-ons. And Neil made the point, too, is on looking at businesses that are a little growthier. Well, part of that is a little earlier in their life cycle, is what I would call it. And these are businesses that maybe 10, 15 years ago, we would get the books on, right? And it was.
Now it's, you know, there's more probably competition around that, so we're being more proactive in reaching into that market through, you know, mid-market bankers, mid-market sponsors, and so that's been a bit of a shift for us, but we're excited about sort of the momentum there.
Look, I know you guys have closed a couple of big deals this year, good-sized deals this year. What's the pipeline look like today? What's the environment like from an M&A perspective?
Yeah, we're super bullish on the next, you know, the coming period. It's hard to put an end date on it-
Sure
... 12-18 months. Simple reason is with interest rates going up. Most of what we buy is from the private equity sort of ecosystem. We've looked at, you know, public companies, and we'll continue to look there if the right valuation lines up. And as Jason said, increasingly for bolt-ons, more middle-market and founder-type stuff. But the substance, the meat of our capital deployment comes from private equity. And when interest rates go up and, you know, valuations go down in the public markets, the private markets lag because there's just option value, just wait. And these companies generate a lot of cash flow. You don't have to raise money to sort of fund operations.
And so that, for the last, I don't know, year and a half, there's been very few transactions. I would say, up a year, so mid, like, mid 2022 to early - late 2023, that year and a half, got very, very busy in the first half of this year. Had a normal summer slowdown, everybody goes on vacation, and it's now picking back up. You know, essentially, if there's, like a, you know, like a simple phrase, we're gonna do - we think there's going to be about three and a half or four years of deals getting compressed into two years.
Mm-hmm.
Because the real fact that's happened is the GPs, the LPs, excuse me, have pressure on the GPs at this stage, and so they want DPI, they need capital back. Also, all the private equity firms know it's not a secret. The very best returning vintage for private equity are the ones after an economic slowdown. So they all need to return money to raise a fund right now, so they can sort of get, like the, you know, a post-economic slowdown sort of vintage, because those are the ones that are, like, once-in-a-decade type returns. So there's a lot of pressure for DPI at the moment, that's what's gonna, I think, drive this activity for the next couple of years.
Yeah, that's awesome. So I'll open it up to the audience. Any questions from the audience? Right here in the fourth row. Just wait one second for the mic.
Hello. So I think the last three years, you guys have grown eight, nine, 8% organic, so kind of in line with your plans to accelerate. And what's hard for investors maybe is that in the short term, we're seeing growth slow, I think, in application software, where some of the higher multiples, you know, businesses that you've bought, faster growing. I think that segment grew 5% last quarter. So can you talk about the things you can see kind of under the surface of kind of trailing revenue and the forward bookings momentum?
Yep
... that give you confidence for-
Jason, I'll take that one.
Yeah, sure. So yeah, the last just to reiterate, the last three years were 8%, 9%, and 8% growth. This year, we're guiding to 6%, and so just kind of unpacking that a little bit, we had you know some COVID rebound in those eight, nine, and eight periods, of course. That's both on the software and to a certain extent, the product side. We also had, specifically last year, a lot of... In our product businesses, the supply chain sort of liberated, and so we had you could see in our TEP segment, just really high growth rates, and so we're comping a lot of that supply chain this year.
And then the other component that you hit on was, you know, enterprise bookings have been. They've been fine, they've been sort of muted, I would say, the last, you know, primarily in 2023, you know, sort of low single digit, you know, sort of enterprise bookings growth. And, you know, things got a little bit better in the second quarter, so we'll see how the second half plays out. But you got to remember, these are-
... this is mission-critical software. Pipelines look good, you know, we don't feel like-- we feel like we're in a good spot in each one of our businesses, and so as things pick back up, we're confident that that will inflect up. And then we just had some episodic things that we've talked about for the last couple of years. Our DAT business, it's a freight matching business, so think, getting into the spot freight market, you know, truckers and brokers, they provide a sort of a dating service. And so with the supply chain dynamics that had happened over the last couple of years, a bunch of carriers came into the market, because the rates were so attractive.
And we've seen that sort of drift down and normalize throughout 2023, and then in 2024, we're sort of facing that headwind. So we're cycling along the bottom there, and we expect that to inflect up once the market sort of recovers because we are sort of the market there primarily. And then our Foundry business is another business in our network software segment that plays in the media and entertainment space. And obviously, with the strikes that happened over the last couple of years, recurring revenue was stable, but sort of new bookings were pretty soft. And so, again, once that. We're starting to see some green shoots there, production's happening again, and we'll obviously capture the market back when that flex up as well.
Question on the left-hand side here?
How much, how much have you been able to get through price rises in this period of slightly higher inflation?
Yeah. So, price for us in our, in our software businesses, for, for a very long time, even pre-acquisition periods, pricing's been a very important lever. But I think if you put it in context, if we have for our non-SMB software businesses, sort of call it 95% gross retention and 105 or 6% sort of net retention, so you have 10 or 11 points of gap, there'll be about four points of price in that. So 40% of the gap we sort of grow to each year is price. Some companies are a touch higher, some are a touch lower. That's been very steady. We're very... Again, with our long-term owning businesses forever, we're careful not to get too aggressive with price.
Some of the sponsors who own businesses temporarily get very aggressive with price, and that's just not a lever we tend to pull. On the product businesses that we have, they did a much better job at capturing price based on the input costs and capturing both the price and the margin. But generally speaking, prior to that, we capture price on new product release because of the value in the new products. You add anything to that?
Any other questions from the audience? All right, let's continue. So you did a couple deals this year, a couple medium-sized, I'd say, deals for you guys. Can we just maybe talk about the Transact deal?
Sure
... that just closed? So talk to us a little bit about what that acquisition brings to the table, on the Connected Campus offering.
Yeah
... and the synergies between that and CBORD.
Yeah. We have a business, actually, our first standalone software business we bought in two thousand and eight-
Yeah
... was CBORD. CBORD is a two-part business, right? It's got a sort of a menu management for institutions and universities, and the whole, if you will, the ERP or the workflow software for feeding people in those institutions. And then they have the Connected Campus piece. Transact has Connected Campus piece and a payments business with the bursar's office. So the strategic rationale for this business was the opportunity to have a more scaled Connected Campus. Both other businesses are great, are fine. They're good businesses. They're gonna continue to grow. They'll get all the capital and focus they need, but the short-term synergy value comes from the overlap of those two.
The thing that we like about it is, you know, we all know that the trends of university enrollment are flat to declining, and, like, what's the value of a four-year degree? What Connected Campus does is it is something that all the universities are doing to make the on-campus experience better and more enriching for the students. So it's helping the universities compete in the face of that sort of macro trend, right? So in short, it's like your card that you get into your dorm room with, unlocks all the academic buildings, your dorm room. It's your student ID, allows you to go, you know, do the swipes for Chick-fil-A or whatever it is. It also allows you to get the lift to go to uptown and go to the, well, the subway or whatever it is.
It's that connected sort of campus and the software that both Transact and CBORD have will be an integration pathway for that, and very excited about that. The trends in that uptake are quite interesting and compelling for a next, you know, for as far as the eye can see in that regard, because, like I said, the strategic implication for universities to become better experiences for the students.
In the context of that organic growth number, the ambition we were talking about earlier today, like, how do you see this business growing in the coming years?
Yeah. So Transact is a high single-digit growth business. CBORD lagged that a little bit. We would hope that the combined business would rerate to be a high single-digit growth business.
Yeah, I'd be remiss if at a tech conference I didn't bring up AI.
Yeah.
So, maybe at a high level, just talk to us about, you know, what the opportunity-
Yeah
... for GenAI brings to your portfolio.
There's the relatively high-level answer that everybody gets, right? There's the opportunities in our products, and there's the opportunities in productivity. I will say that being a vertical market software player across, you know, twenty plus or minus micro-verticals, it is we're in an advantageous position for two reasons. One, obviously, we have the data that's very specific. Like, we have whatever vertical it is, we have super specific data, but I think what gets lost oftentimes is the vertical market players also know the very bespoke and nuanced question in which to apply the data to. Like, that's where the power of AI and GenAI really gets unlocked.
Like, probably one of the more advanced examples we have that's partially in the field and still, and there's a fair amount of product to be released, is our legal software business, right? The generic problem is how do you create a professional services bill, a compliant bill? Right? The very nuanced is how does, you know, law firm A create a compliant first pass bill for client Z, right? And that is, and client Z's rules for paying are different than client X's rules, and it's remarkably complicated how, you know, a law firm has to bill and get paid compliantly. So our software is basically the listening agent using GenAI to create a compliant time report the first time through that's gonna get paid the first pass through. It's remarkably nuanced.
Mm-hmm.
You know, DAT, the business that Jason just mentioned, there's a huge issue in the spot in the freight markets generally about fraud, you know, and double brokering, and just fraudsters, like, stealing sort of loads of whatever it is and selling them in an off market. So we have GenAI and computational AI algorithms to detect fraud, and we're really leading the industry, like, completely the 100% leading the industry and getting industry accolades for that. You know, in our foundry business, the media entertainment business, this is a business that the software is used to take in, like, Game of Thrones, the animated dragon and the live action shot, and it's called compositing those two things together on a frame.
And so you have to do that for thousands of frames on end, and so it's a creative process, and the IP is such that each film is a... and each project is unique set of IP. You can't use IP from other projects. And so but once you sort of composite one frame to do this, and you've got 10 more frames that are just whatever, flapping the wings of the dragon, we're using AI tools to carry the IP forward in that, for instance. And so, it's there are lots of examples. And then, on the productivity side, you know, increasing, we're seeing 25% and 30%, you know, sometimes higher, you know, developer productivity. That's gonna be, you know, standard play, it already is.
And maybe more exciting or equally exciting is: How do we sort of take customer service and not just have level one agents become level two or three agents overnight? 'Cause the data's being served to them, or the agent's sort of listening to the conversation, serving up recommendations real time, but ultimately turning that to be customer facing. So Aderant will make that a customer-facing application beginning in 2025. So essentially, level one support will be done by the clients versus sort of Aderant people. So lots of opportunities in terms of AI. Final thing I'd say is, I'd be curious if other people are or if you're hearing this in a conference, there's definitely the hype, and now there's a little bit of a, "We're in this stage," and then it'll sort of take off from there in terms of just use cases.
Mm-hmm.
But, it's good, it allows us to digest what we're doing.
And I would just say, even though we're decentralized-
Yeah
... this has been an area of focus for the corporate office and, you know, teaching the companies what it means, and then ultimately enabling them to have sort of work groups. So we've got a work group for software development, customer success. They've already kind of taken a life of their own, and it's been great to have the ability to learn across the portfolio, especially around mistakes that people make, and so that's been helpful.
Yep. Thank you for that.
So we'll end on this last question. I asked you this question last year, but I think it's helpful for anybody that didn't listen to the presentation last year, 'cause we get the question every once in a while as well. Just given the fact that you've been so focused on vertical software, there's a concern that some of the horizontal software players can come in and encroach on your business. How likely do you view that concern, and have you experienced any type of that encroachment across pieces of your portfolio?
When we're doing our diligence, because we're so risk averse, if we see a zero on a Monte Carlo for any reason, horizontal encroaching or the technology algorithm is changing every three years, and you could lose that product, whatever it is, if there's a zero in the Monte Carlo, we're out. Like, we're just fundamentally out. We're so risk averse to that. I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that a horizontal player disrupts any meaningful way any of our verticals, simply because of the size of the prize. That's one of the protective nature of being in small markets. Like, if you wanna is one thing. Second is our markets are very well served. I mean, it's not as though we're delivering a bad experience, or competitors are delivering a bad experience. It's very well served.
Have experienced it once, about a decade ago, in a healthcare IT laboratory application. Have learned from that experience, have meaningfully tweaked the way we do our diligence to identify that trend, and we haven't experienced it since.
Great to have you guys here today. Thank you for coming to the conference.
Thank you for having us. Thanks so much.
It's great to see you again.
It's great. Thank you for your questions.