Good morning. Can everyone hear me okay? Look, thanks for joining us this morning. We have a lot of exciting things to share with you. Before we get started, I wanna introduce a few people that are here with us today supporting the company, the management team and our shareholders. The Chair of our board, Christine M. Cournoyer. Would you raise your hand? Thank you, Chris. Also, Chair of our audit committee, Todd Stein. Would you raise your hand? The Chair of our compensation committee, Randy Hyun, would you raise your hand? Thank you. Appreciate you joining us. All right, we'll go ahead and get started. Before I jump into the main part of the presentation, all of you are familiar with the safe harbor statement. We're gonna share a lot of information with you guys today, we're gonna talk about how we see the future.
What this basically says is, what we're telling you today is information based on the best of our knowledge as it stands today. Things can change in the future, and it might change our outlook. What I'm gonna do today is go over our mission with you. Michael Wallace, he's the President of our operating company and our Chief Operating Officer, will dive deeper into the tactics that we're employing to achieve our strategy. Product development, you'll hear from Tim Tindle, our CIO. You're gonna hear our go-to-market strategy from Jonathan Wax, our EVP of global sales. Calvin Rice, our Chief Financial Officer, will regale you with all our recent financial results and our outlook. I'll come back up and wrap it up with capital allocation.
I said on our earnings call this morning, our mission is pretty straightforward. We're here to make money for our shareholders and return capital to our shareholders, and we think we're pretty good at that. We've been doing that for a long time. This morning, we told you about how we did that in the first quarter and what our outlook is for 2023. Today, we're gonna go a little bit further than that and talk to you about the things that we're putting in place that'll allow us to do this over the long term 'cause we think we can pay this dividend for a long time out to the future, and we think we can grow into the current level of dividend quite comfortably. We're focused on maximizing the cash flow, but maximizing it over the long term.
We are making still investments in the business. We're doing everything we can to protect that revenue stream going forward 'cause that's the source of all the cash that flows down to the bottom line and into your pockets. You know, when you look at the investment highlights of the company, one of the most important assets that this company has is our customer base, and we have a blue-chip customer base who represents the who's who in healthcare. Many of these customers have been customers of ours for a very, very long time. We have relationships with those customers at very, very high levels inside those organizations, and that's a very valuable attribute that Spok brings to the table. We have a very stable revenue base, reoccurring in nature.
All of our wireless revenue is essentially recurring in nature, our software maintenance revenue is recurring in nature, and Mike will give you a deeper dive on both of those later this morning. We have bookings momentum in our software operations bookings. We had a good year in 2022. That has continued in 2023, including through April. Thank you very much, John. We're on a roll this year. We think we got more good things to come there. Tim Tindle has been doing a phenomenal job with our product roadmap. We're still spending a little over $11 million a year on R&D. We don't intend to spend more than that, but it's important that we do make those investments.
When you see Tim's presentation today, I think you'll agree with me, these are important investments to protect that future revenue stream and grow it going forward. Last but not least, obviously, we have significant annual free cash flow. We've got a fortress balance sheet. We've got a decent amount of cash on the balance sheet. We've got a significant amount of deferred tax assets. We don't think we'll be in a tax paying situation based on our outlook for quite a while. You know, not quite 10 years, but maybe, you know, seven or eight years. We're really in good shape from a balance sheet perspective. Some attributes of the company. We are a leader in healthcare communications. We've been doing it for a long time.
We have relationships inside those hospitals, and we understand the workflows of hospitals, particularly the top hospitals in the United States, very, very thoroughly. We interface with all the critical systems that they operate, we interface our software with their electronic health record systems. Any important clinical communication system inside a hospital in general is integrating with Spok when we deliver our messaging. Largest paging carrier in the United States with over 800,000 subscribers out there. Paging is an asset that a lot of people just ignore or assume is gonna go away, or doesn't have value.
I can tell you that in this environment, particularly in healthcare, where communications matter, and it's a matter of life and death, making sure that the clinicians get those messages is critically important, and paging is better at that than a lot of other technologies, particularly when there's an emergency. If nothing else, it's a redundant form of communication, and Tim will walk you through why that's important going forward. He was the CIO at Harris Health, which is the third largest public health system in the nation, he was a big supporter of paging in his organization 'cause it saves lives. You know, we've got intellectual property in our R&D. We've been at this for many, many years. We've got incredible workflows that are very specific to how hospitals operate. Really good at operating the business.
We know how to generate cash flow and run this business. We've been a pioneer in healthcare communications for a long time. Like I said, we have phenomenal relationships with those hospitals. You know, it's tight in hospitals right now, people still like to buy stuff, right? People like to buy stuff from people they like, and people like people that actually have relationship with them and care about them, and that's something that we are really good at, and our sales force has long-standing relationships. You know, our whole ecosystem in terms of the solutions that we offer that centers around our contact center software, our call center software. Many of our customers have some of these, many of our customers don't have all of these.
We have an opportunity not just to go after new logo in the healthcare space, but also go after our existing customers, not just with upgrades, but selling them additional solutions in our portfolio. Our plan is pretty straightforward. The long-term objective is to generate that cash, return capital to shareholders. What do we have to do in the short term to make that happen and be very, very successful? You know, software bookings is very, very important. You know, we have to achieve plan. We wanna show year-over-year growth. That's in our plan this year. As I just said, we're hitting our plan, we're beating our plan this year. We're 11% ahead of plan year to date through April. Very, very happy about that. That's very important. The product roadmap progress is important, and Tim will walk you through that.
We need to continue delivering those upgrades in the technology, in the operating systems, in the databases, in the cyber that these hospital CIOs need to feel comfortable about managing their business safely. Wireless revenue stabilization is really, really important. You know, we had positive unit and service variance from our plan, but also positive ARPU. Last year, we did a couple things. We did price increases late in the year. In the third quarter of last year, we did about a 3% price increase to our subscriber base. That price increase only hit about 70% of our subscribers 'cause the other 30% are on long-term contracts, and, you know, you just don't have the ability contractually to increase. We're gonna consider doing that again this year in the third quarter. There's some opportunity there.
The other thing that we've done is we initiated a new technology, a new paging device, called the GenA pager, and Tim will break that down for you today in great detail. What I want you to understand from my perspective on the GenA pager is we're getting an ARPU of about $10 a month, average revenue per unit, about $10 a month on our GenA pagers that we're putting out there. Our normal average revenue per month inside hospitals is about $6.68. If you think about it, a GenA pager is worth 1.5x of a regular pager. It's just a much higher ARPU. It's something that we really wanna have as a big part of our future. It's exclusive to Spok. Nobody else can get it out there.
We paid for the technology to design it, our IP, and it's really a phenomenal device, and the hospitals are loving it, and they're going out the door. We were touring the board through our logistics center the other day, I didn't plan it this way, but we just so happened to walk by a module in the shipping and receiving department, and the GenA pager was there with the actual name of the hospital on the front of it on that kind of Paperwhite screen, if you will. It's just a very impressive device, super long battery life, really good RF characteristics, and hospitals are loving it so far. That's gonna help breathe life and continue that revenue flywheel, if you will, with respect to our wireless business. What's going on with our customers?
It's no secret, you can read in the paper, healthcare still has some fiscal challenges that came about as a result of the pandemic. One of the things that happened is they lost a lot of clinicians during the pandemic. You know, nurses that had been around for a long time burned out and left. You know, other nurses were looking at the market and figuring out that they could be traveling nurses and make 1.5x what they were making inside their institution. It got very tough on hospital operating budgets. Inflation has caused things to go up, capital budgets are tight. What these hospitals are doing and how they're reacting to it is they're not buying a lot of brand-new stuff. You know, we have a board member that sits on our board.
Her name is Dr. Bobbie Byrne. She's the CIO at Advocate Aurora Health. She tells us, "Look, you know, we're not buying the shiny new thing. What we wanna do is we wanna leverage the existing assets that we have, improve them, learn how to operate them more efficiently, and get more out of them." That's what they're interested in doing. Ironically, that falls right into our strength. The way we're reacting to that is we've gone to these hospitals and we said, "Look, we're gonna limit major upgrades to a 3-4-year cycle for you. You buy an upgrade, you're gonna get all your technology upgraded, your database is gonna get upgraded, your operating systems you operate on from a cybersecurity standpoint, you're gonna be much more protected.
We're gonna come in, we're gonna analyze how you're doing business, cause remember, we have 2,200 hospitals, and we understand the workflows in these hospitals, and we understand the best practices of the best hospitals in the nation. We're gonna come in with a value-added services team, we're gonna analyze how you're doing business, and we're gonna make recommendations to you on which modules you're using well, which modules you've already bought that you're not leveraging as much as you possibly could, which modules we have for sale to you that you could employ and maybe get rid of another third-party vendor and save money. That's planned, and we're doing this over three and five year maintenance and managed service deals. We're signing up a lot of these big hospitals for these multi-year deals out into the future.
The other added benefit of that is it's gonna reduce your churn, right? 'Cause they're gonna be locked in for a long time going forward. We're having great success. Notwithstanding some of the financial challenges at the hospitals and what they're facing today with the inflation and the tight capital markets, et c., it's actually helping us this year. We're actually in a very, very good place. We were just talking with one of our advisors, one of the investment bankers at Piper Sandler.
You know, we were talking about this very issue. He said, "Yeah, I know you guys are really, you know, our analysis suggests you guys are really in a good spot, you know, with what you're doing and your strategy, and you've got several more years like that before things get better with these hospitals." We're gonna make hay while the sun shines with this strategy. You probably saw this morning, we did change our financial guidance, you know, sorry to do it so quick on you. Last quarter, we gave you some financial guidance, already a quarter later, we had to up it.
My takeaway from this is if you look at the spreads on our revenue guidance, and you look at the spreads on our Adjusted EBITDA guidance, the midpoint of that guidance, we raised from a revenue perspective $ 1.5 million . The midpoint of the guidance from an Adjusted EBITDA perspective, we raised $ 0.5 million . If you think about it, you know, the incremental leverage we're getting off of $1 of added revenue, $0.33 of that is falling right to the bottom line. It's pretty good, and we probably can do better than that.
You know, another way to look at this thing, and I don't want the finance guys to get mad at me, but, you know, the way I look at it fair-fairly simply is, let's just say we did $26 million of Adjusted EBITDA this year. You know, not promising it, but it's entirely possible. It's within our guidance range. I'm kinda old school about thinking about cash. We're gonna spend $3.5 million or so on CapEx. That leaves about $22.5 million of the stack of cash that this business is gonna generate this year. We're gonna pay you guys $25 million in dividends. That leaves a hole of about $2.5 million. It's not a problem. Got a big balance sheet with a lot of cash and no debt.
We are on the hunt to break that even. We are on a hunt to make that 2.5 million zero, to get back to cash flow breakeven. You know, it's entirely possible we do that sooner than what we have on our plan, and I'm really focused with the team, and the team is really focused on getting to that number sooner rather than later. 2024, I feel like we could really get there. A lot of things have to happen to get there. You know, you can't have some big exogenous issue in the economy that we can't control that locks everything up. I mean, if everything kinda stays the way it's been going, well, we're on the pace to be able to do that. It's something that I think would be an incredible accomplishment.
We had planned on doing that eventually, but it looks like things are going better than we thought. We'll keep you updated. Who knows? Maybe at some point in the future, we'll improve this guidance again. Couple things in terms of the customer base we have. You know, every year, Black Book Research does a secure clinical communication survey with hospitals. They go out there, and they ask all the hospitals what packages do you use. They have all these attributes. Let's rate them. And for the last six years, we've been number one in that annual survey. You know, we're proud of this. Look, we're number one, not just by a little, right?
'Cause we're number one in 11 of the criteria, you know, and if you look at the next closest one would have three, and that would be Epic, and then the rest are just two or one. We're really crushing it in terms of how our customers perceive us. Remember I talked about those relationships? I mean, that kinda thing has, in a mentality of a CIO who's filling out a survey, when they like you might get better scores than if they don't like you. Some of this is subjective too. You know, something we're proud of. Then I talked about our customer base and some of the tenure of our long-standing customers. Every year, U.S. News & World Report does a survey, and they put out what they call their honor roll.
They put 10 children's hospitals on the honor roll, and they put 20 adult hospitals on the honor roll. We've always had the overwhelming majority of those hospitals as customers, whether it's in the wireless column with the green check marks or in the software column with the green check marks. As you can see, the overwhelming majority in both columns with the green check marks are our customers. Those are the best hospitals in the United States, right? There's other good hospitals that aren't on this list, but, I mean, these are the ones that got ranked the best, and they're our customers. Not only are they our customers, they've been our customers, on average for 22 years. It's a great asset for this company and something that I think bodes well for the future.
They're buying from us this year. I think they'll buy from us in the future. I think the investments that we're making with our team, with Tim Tindle and his R&D group, are gonna pay future dividends. We're gonna be careful how much we invest there. We learned our lesson with Spok Go. We're doing this to make money, and we're doing this to return capital to our shareholders. We'll go a little bit deeper in just a second. This is our management team. It's a great management team. Michael Wallace, he's our President and Chief Operating Officer. You're gonna hear from him in just as soon as I'm done talking. He's gonna go a lot deeper into what we're doing on a tactical basis with our strategy. Sharon Woods Keisling. Sharon, you wanna raise your hand?
She's our treasurer, secretary, and basically does everything for us from building leases to you name it. Tim Tindle, our CIO. You'll hear from him in a little bit. He was the CIO at Harris Health before he came to us. John Wax, our EVP of sales. You'll hear from him today. Since we promoted John last year to this position, he hasn't missed a single number. That's nice in a sales guy, and we really, really appreciate that, John. Please continue that. Renee Hall runs our human resources. She's also our Chief Compliance Officer. A phenomenal job. Calvin Rice, the youngest member of our management team, gives us the ability to drill down so deep.
The metrics now that we have with the software that we use in our internal reporting systems allows us to do a lot of analysis to make us more efficient, and he's really, really an expert at that. Plus, he keeps us all entertained. Calvin's wonderful. Mick Ling, who's in charge of our maintenance on the software side, he's not here with us today, but that's a very important position. You know, we go out there, and we get, what, 4% or 5% annual uplift on those maintenance contracts? That's hard to do in this environment, and he's ahead of plan this year through April continuing to do it. We put him up there because we really appreciate him. He's a real pro, very important to the team.
I'll stop talking now for a little while and turn it over to the hardest-working man in show business.
Thank you.
Michael Wallace.
Okay, good morning, everyone. It's good to see people in person for a change. It's been about, what, two or three years before we've been able to be together. Hello to everybody on the webcast. Hopefully you guys can all hear us quite well. I wanna take Vince's thoughts and just drill a bit deeper into what we're doing from a software perspective and a wireless perspective, as we move forward, kind of post-pivot, from the Spok Go days. It's really three pillars, right? The first is, from a software perspective is very straightforward, right? Is to grow bookings and revenue ultimately, as it relates to our software business. We're gonna do that a couple of ways.
Tim Tindle, when he walks you through what we're doing from an R&D perspective, we are back to being 100% focused on Spok Care Connect. Our on-premise solution that really drives, you know, kind of our historical legacy software business. That's really a function of being able to do two things: continuing to drive enhancements so that we can drive value to that customer base that Vince showed, that really blue chip customer base that we've got. Really by allowing us to go out and get new logos, 'cause new logos are really ultimately what's gonna drive what we're doing. We've got a dominant market share as it relates to the large hospitals, so over 600 beds.
What we're gonna talk to you today as we go through these slides is we have a product now, a hosted solution that's gonna be hosted here in our Plano facility, so that we can go and attack the small and mid-size hospitals, which historically we haven't been able to attack, mainly because the cost of an on-premise solution is just too big for them at the outset from an investment standpoint. The second pillar is really around our wireless business. You know, the idea here is this is, this is a great franchise, as Vince mentioned, but it is not a business that we would expect to grow in the long term. Having said that, we did show, you know, year-over-year growth in the first quarter, which was certainly very nice to see.
The goal with this business is to maximize it for what it's worth. Making sure that we've got the network reliability to service our customers. The price increases that Vince mentioned in order to drive some top line. We're gonna walk you through the GenA pager and what that's doing for the business. As I'll get through into wireless here in a minute, we really have the ability to scale this business in order to maintain the margins, even if we do have a little bit of erosion from a revenue perspective. The third pillar is the one that you've come to know us pre Spok Go and now, which is to flat out maximize free cash flow.
Our goal is to do that, to drive as much as we can from a dividend perspective. I liked Vince's example of $22 and a half million dollars of cash and growing that to the ability to be able to cover that dividend 100% in the next, call it 18 - 24 months. Let's dive a little bit deeper. We'll start out from a software perspective. You know, Spok Care Connect is really the moniker, if you will, that contains the suite of products that is our software business. The center of that business is really the contact center itself.
That's really the sun at which a number of the other products like Spok Messenger, which is our critical alerting, Spok Mobile, which is encrypted messaging, et c., kind of all work around the center of that universe, that contact center. These are all on-premise solutions. You know, the core services, the sort of crown jewel is the directory. Think of a constantly curated database of all of the communication information in a hospital setting, whether that be clinicians, i.e., doctors, nurses, administrators, third parties that the hospital uses, maintenance facilities. All of that contact information is critical in having the ability for the hospital to actually function the way that they need to. You also got things like on-call scheduling, you've got message routing, et c.
Look, we've been doing this a long time. We know how to attack this business. We've got lots of very referenceable customers. The reality is that we're in that period where we are refocusing, as we've been telling you the last kind of 12-15 months, on this Spok Care Connect product. From a product direction standpoint, kind of three areas to touch on. One is tackling some technical debt that we've got, as well as driving enhancements and features, so we can continue to serve that very valuable franchise we've got from a large hospital perspective. The second is what I talked about briefly before, which is this hosted version of Spok Care Connect, so that we can go after the small and mid-size hospitals that we have historically not had a great penetration in.
Thirdly, over time, and Tim's gonna walk you through this in more detail, is to really develop a more common and efficient architecture as it relates to our Spok Care Connect solutions so that we can get, you know, savings and efficiencies throughout not only our customers, but internally as well, through product and development, through professional services, customer support, et c. You know, very importantly, even though I'm talking about software, we do have wireless integration. Our wireless paging business, connects, if you will, through our Spok Mobile products.
We have about $6 million-$7 million a year in revenue of folks that use our Spok Mobile app, think of your smart app on your phone, and they get their paging, their pages through that app. It's a common architecture that allows you to have both the paging business as well as the software side of the house. On the wireless side, really a function. Again, as I said, this is a great franchise, not one that is going to grow a great deal. The reality is what we're constantly doing, and this company has been great at this long before I got here, which is being able to groom the network so that we can maintain the margins that we've got in this business, even if we see a little bit of erosion from a revenue perspective.
On the revenue side, we're doing a couple things. Vince mentioned the rate increases. We're in an inflationary environment. We're not getting much in the way of pushback as it relates to these small increases that we're doing. You see the first picture here of the GenA pager, Kindle-like background screen. You see that there's icons that are very similar to what you see on your smartphone, et c. Vince mentioned we're getting $2, $3, $4 more from an ARPU perspective. Those are the things that are driving the top line to offset what we're seeing from an erosion standpoint in units and service, which continue to decline just a little bit on a year-over-year basis. Healthcare continues to be a big focus of ours.
Over the last 10 years or so, you can see that it's gone from a little over 60% to more than 85% at this point. You know, it's interesting, Vince had a couple of good slides up there about the challenges that the healthcare world has been seeing. You know, It's a market though that is still, what, 20% of GDP in this country, so something that's certainly not going away anytime soon. What we saw with Spok Go is they continue to spend, but they're just not gonna spend on new platforms. They're gonna spend on things that they understand that are critical to what they do. Let's face it, what we do at Spok is really essentially a utility for what the hospital does. It allows the hospital to essentially run.
We are basically the system of action as it relates to what they do in the hospital setting. Again, taking a step back, just looking at the software side of the business, the CC&C market, so, Clinical Communication and Collaboration market. This is a market that looks to grow to about $4 billion in 2030. It's about half that today, about $2 billion. It's growing at about 11% a year. Of course, our biggest market is in North America. That's about $600 million, growing to about a little over $1 billion in 2030. To some perspective, you know, we're doing about $60 million in revenue on the software side, so today we're about a 10% player in this market.
A lot to still go after, especially the white and green space in the large hospital market and certainly in that small to mid-sized hospital market that we're going to attack with our hosted solution. Looking at, some competitive positioning. You know, kind of the four corners here. On the far left, you've got the contact center. It's interesting you don't see a lot in the way of competitors. This company called ARC, very small company, we rarely see them. We see Amtelco a little bit, but there's not a lot in the way of contact center solutions that are out there. You may ask, "Well, then who are they using?" They use a lot of internal developed systems, offshoots of PBXs, et c.
You know, the products that we provide to them are critically important because we match the workflows within the hospital. It's a very esoteric market, being in healthcare at the end of the day. You know, at the top is on-call scheduling. I think most of you have probably heard of Qgenda, Amion, etc . The good news is that for all of these, except for the contact center solutions, we largely interoperate with these. Even though a hospital may have them, we interoperate with them. Clinical alerting, Connexall, that's a company in Canada, doesn't have a huge presence in the U.S. Then you see the big conglomeration of companies in care coordination. You've got, you know, the big players like Epic and Cerner, so the electronic health record companies.
You know, they're really the system of record, i.e., you know, if you guys have gone to a doctor lately, you sit there and he's hardly ever looking at you, and he's doing his work as he's typing into one of the electronic health record systems. You've got, you know, texting-type players like TigerConnect. You've got Vocera and Voalte that kinda cross over from a clinical alerting system. For the most part, we interoperate with virtually all of these companies so that Spok sits at the middle of this chart because it allows you from one platform to get the right message to the right device to the right person at the end of the day.
As I said, you know, we're the system of action as opposed to maybe an Epic or Cerner, which are the systems of record. You know, it is critical for us, and something that Tim works on a great deal, is to make sure that we are interoperable, like I said, with the majority of these players, so that we can sit in the middle from a competitive standpoint. Just a couple of slides, just to reorient everybody.
I thought it was important, you know, as we've gone back and sort of refocused our efforts on our on-premise set of solutions, I thought it was good for this audience to really kind of set the stage and level set that, you know, from 2012 to call it 2018, 2019, our operations bookings, which Jonathan Wax is responsible for, but the whole company is responsible for. We were doing, you know, $35 million-$37 million pretty much on average each and every year. What's labeled as number two there is a couple of years where we were clearly focused on Spok Go, less of a focus on our on-premise solutions.
You see what's labeled as number three is essentially the pivot that we've been talking about away from Spok Go back to our products. The reason I wanted to show you this is that, you know, step number 1 is really just getting where we're at back to where we've been. We're not trying to go and do something more than we've even done in the past. From there, we look to, of course, grow. Step 1 over the next couple of years is to really get back to the levels that we saw kind of in the 2012 to 2018 range. Vince mentioned maintenance. Obviously recurring, extremely profitable from a gross margin perspective. This is an 80 %+ margin piece of our business.
As you can see from 2012- 2018, it grew along with essentially the bookings that you saw on the previous page. You have a little bit of a dip as it relates to. We saw the decline in bookings labeled number two here. What we would expect is with a lag, you'll essentially see maintenance revenue begin to have the same trajectory ultimately as what we see from an operations bookings perspective. From an investment perspective, I would tell you the tip of the spear, as you would guess, is clearly operations bookings at the end of the day. Just wanted to reorient everybody just to give you a look at where we had been in the very recent past, as far as Spok Care Connect.
With that, I will turn it over to my friend, Tim Tindle.
Thank you, Mike.
You bet.
All right. Set this right here. All right. Good morning. I'll start off with a little bit of a discussion on our wireless business. For those of you who aren't familiar with the broader business, Spok is the largest U.S. paging network in the United States, by a sizable percentage. With over 100 million messages a month, we really, really have a robust network that's capable of scaling to just about anything that our customers can throw at it. It's a network that's been around for quite a while. It's standardized across the United States with standard products and services and our field service team. We have substantial availability at 99.9 + availability nationwide.
It's secure from end to end, using satellite communications as well as terrestrial. And encryption across the network, which is absolutely critical for HIPAA security in the healthcare space. We dominate the paging space and the critical communications using this technology, and as mentioned before, it's integrated with our software solutions. Why does paging remain relevant in healthcare? It's really, really life and death. We support hospitals, and hospitals are dealing with trauma centers, the critical patients, and it means that doctors and nurses and people have to get those messages. They depend on them to the point where they carry a pager. They all have cell phones, but they carry a pager. Why is it so reliable?
It's not as obvious as you might think, but a cell phone, for instance, connects to 1 cell tower at a time. That tower transmits at 100 W. When you take a look at any commercial building, you've been in a building where you couldn't get cell service. You get into a hospital where you have lead-lined walls and MRI machines and CT scanners and those kinds of things, and that's a truly hostile environment. Communications inside a hospital are challenging. In a paging network, we have 900 MHz at 3,500 W. It's not one tower to one pager. It is a cluster of towers that are transmitting simulcast all at the same time at that amazingly high wattage to that pager.
We can penetrate concrete, steel, you name it, and that's why it is so reliable, and it's such a critical difference between using a wireless device like a cell phone versus a pager. Another key thing for doctors, especially, doctors see thousands of patients a year. It's difficult to keep home and work separate. When you have so many people you talk to, giving them your cell phone number is a kind of risky thing if you wanna have any kind of privacy at all. A pager, however, you can really separate the messages that you're getting that are critical and important to your patient and your healthcare practice versus your cell phone, which is going to be mixed. It's gonna have some business, certainly something you wanna keep separate.
The transmitters we talked about is also one of the most survivable networks on the planet. We have two separate wireless networks that go through two separate satellites that go to transmitters on the ground that are on each network. We have A transmitters and B transmitters. As I told you, they simulcast to the pagers. If we lost a satellite, we still have a completely separate channel. That's one of the reasons that during hurricanes, earthquakes, you name it. The one form of communication that's still there is paging.
The cost factor, obviously, when I was at Harris Health, I was faced with putting cell phones across the floors, and when you add the battery pack and a lot of the other hardening that you need to do in an environment like that, I was looking at over $2,000 a device versus a pager, which is just $10-$15 a month. It is a tremendously more cost-efficient option, and everybody doesn't need a smart device. The folks that take care of cleaning the rooms, the transportation people that go move patients from place to place. There are many workers in a healthcare institution that you don't need to give a $2,000 cell phone to in order to get that job done.
When I was at Harris, one of the things I really enjoyed was discussions with the residents. We had both Baylor College of Medicine and The University of Texas. The residents, young, aggressive, good folks, and they would hit me up and say, "How do you work this thing?" They're a cell phone generation. They looked at that pager, and they went, "I'm not sure I get this." When I got to Spok, one of the things we had a conversation about is, how do we make this more appealing to the smartphone generation? They just don't really get this kind of a user interface, and that's because that user interface was designed in the 90s, okay? There was a huge gap. Together, the engineering team at Spok is quite remarkable.
We put our heads together. We found this amazing Paperwhite display. It's super high resolution. If you look at a normal pager, it only has one or two, maybe three lines, they're really big characters, you can't get much on the screen. This can have up to 10 lines. It's super easy to read. You don't see all the different screens, it's a graphical user interface with icons that look a lot like a smartphone. Just some basic stuff. You can put the doctor's name on there. I watch doctors go into the OR, they put their pagers on a table 'cause they couldn't take them into the OR. They come out, there's 9 pagers there. They all look identical. They sit there and sort through which one's mine.
Just simple things like that can make a really big difference. During the pandemic, as we were doing the development, it just seemed to also make sense that to make an antimicrobial housing for this to help us contribute to the infection control issues associated with handling devices across a hospital system. A feature that no other pager that I know of has, which is the ability to program this over the air. Many organizations, all hospitals have things like a rapid response team, which are doctors and nurses that if a patient has an emergent problem, they'll activate that team, and that team goes to that patient's aid.
If you're on the rapid response team in a lot of hospitals, you'll have your regular pager, and then you'll have the rapid response pager, which is kind of, you're starting to look like Tim the Tool Man, right? With this kind of technology, we actually are able to over the air program your pager that you're now on this shift as part of the rapid response team. It's you keep your pager, it's still your pager, or we'll put you in some other group if you need to be put into a paging group for any special reason. It used to be that we had to have the pager back all the way to the factory to put those paging groups on the pagers and send them back out, which really just wasn't practical.
Now these pagers can perform many services in large groups without having to go anywhere because we can program them remotely. You know, from a strategy point of view, this is exactly what the market wanted. We made huge investments and functionality and improvements in battery life and many, many other things, and because of that, we're seeing that our strategy is working. It's slowing the erosion of the units and service trends and actually starting to turn it around. The customers see the value so much that we are getting about 50% more ARPU from one of these devices versus the other. We actually leveraged our existing infrastructure and wireless and our software to produce this device, and in doing so, it really was remarkably inexpensive to develop this.
Now let's talk a little bit about Care Connect Suite. This wheel is an important tool that we use with our customers because it really talks about hospitals are incredibly complex, and this wheel has critical communication elements that represent different solutions that we offer organizations. When we have conversations with customers, we oftentimes will change the color of the puzzle piece to represent which components they currently have. As we discuss their problems, we talk about which puzzle piece they might need in order to fill that hole. Kinda one of the very first products that we have that's really core up to the Care Connect Suite is the console itself.
If you can imagine a contact center that's handling all of the inbound phone calls, all the internal phone calls. They're expected to know what to do with that. Handling calls and finding the right place and the right person and transferring that, when they used to do it on a phone, it's kind of a laborious task. These consoles are very sophisticated. The information of the caller is automatically placed up there. If they wanna go to a specific service, which is common, there are quick and easy buttons that they can click on and immediately handle the transfer of that call. This console has not only shortcuts and ways to handle the inbound calls and outbound calls, but also to have all the information they need in order to handle the call. A healthcare system has an incredibly complex workforce.
You have doctors, many of which are not employed, they're contracted. You have employees that work for your organization. You have contractors that work for your organization. At Harris Health in the Houston campus, we may have had 20,000 employees, but we had another 11,000 contracted employees. How do you keep track of all those folks? For them to be able to do their job, they not only need that entire workforce, but they need to know each member of that workforce, how am I supposed to contact them? Do they have our mobile secure messaging app? Do they have a cell phone? What's their SMS number? What's their department number?
All of these facts need to be kept and on hand for these operators to immediately be able to access that person for whatever caller they have. When Mike was talking about curating this data, these folks are on the front line. If that data isn't any good, they're the ones that are caught in the middle trying to help somebody, oftentimes in a critical situation. They also have a process where if they have bad data, they fix that bad data and use our system to update it, so in the future, that data becomes extremely valuable. In fact, in many organizations, the directory that we have for our customers as part of the Care Connect suite is the source of truth for the workforce information. For who is our workforce? What is their role?
What is their department? How do I access that person? A very, very key component to this. The other thing the console does is they get codes, emergency codes, all kinds of critical communications traffic, and even in some cases, they act as an answering service for doctors. All of that is a pretty wide variety of tasks with a lot of different data that has to be communicated to folks. The console actually has workflows that will pop up, and they use. It gives a template to them to know what information to put where in order to handle that code and make sure that the right people are notified and can respond to whatever emergency has just been activated.
I could go on and on and on, but the console is absolutely a key component for any hospital for its critical communications. The on-call schedule. At Harris, I had 6,000 doctors, including residents and medical students. I cannot tell you how many medical services that represented. If you can imagine, if I need somebody in the emergency room stat from cardiology, I actually when I first got there were sticky notes, there were binders, there was spreadsheets that were printed out that it was kinda horrifying, to be honest with you. Until you get a solution like this where you have an on-call schedule, which each department maintains 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each department maintains their on-call schedule, and that is available to our console, to our mobile devices, to all of the applications in the Care Connect suite, to make sure that we know how to get alerts or other critical communications to those folks. Spok Voice Connect. You know, we look at these call centers, we work with our customers, and quite frankly, it's a very labor-intensive area. Spok Voice Connect was created to help offload a lot of routine calls. You can call a hospital number with Spok Voice Connect and interact. It does speech recognition and/or touch tone, and it can help just give hours of operation, address, directions. Basic information which handles a substantial amount of the calls.
It can also, you can ask for individuals' names or departments, and it'll transfer you to those people or those departments. Obviously, that takes a huge load off the operators, and they're left to really handle the most critical of communications challenges for that health system. This has a tremendous ROI in that it typically reduces dramatically the overhead required in a call center to handle the calls coming into it. The other element of Spok Voice Connect is integrated voice response. That's the ability to take this and create an application that either through voice or touch tone allows folks to interact with one of the healthcare system's information systems. A good example of that would be appointment reminders.
Before I implemented a solution like this, my ambulatory appointments at Harris Health System had a 30% no-show rate. That's an incredible impact to your ability, not only for revenue, but costs of idle personnel that are sitting there with nothing to do. Revenue, my gosh, what's the revenue impact of that to a hospital? If you wanna talk about ROI, taking a platform like this and designing an appointment reminder system, and I was able to drop that no-show rate from 30%- 8%. We do 2 million visits a year, do the math, and that's a lot of money that we put back into the coffers of the organization. That's just one example of what you can do with this platform.
Spok Mobile is a mobile secure messaging application that again, it's part of the Spok Care Connect Suite. It has access to that wonderful directory. When you have it, you know who to contact, either by role or individual. You know whether they have a Spok Mobile themselves or whether you need to call them. You have their on-call information for all those departments. That is an endpoint for Spok Care Connect, where we can send the alerts and alarms and all the different critical communications that come in that get routed to these folks. It's a key element in the Spok Care Connect Suite for messaging. Speaking of messaging and alerts, Spok Messenger is an alert management system.
When you think of alert management, you cannot believe all of the systems and equipment and things in a healthcare institution that can go wrong that alarm. There are refrigerators that store blood that have to be kept within a certain range. There's refrigerators for tissue. There's refrigerators for special medication. That's just refrigerators. There's patient monitoring equipment. The nurse call button at the bedside that they push, that's an alarm. We interface with over 200 systems, both clinical and non-clinical, in the healthcare environment, and then you have to understand each one of them and where is that information supposed to go. If that refrigerator is malfunctioning, who's supposed to be notified that that refrigerator needs to be addressed?
The institution then begins to use that platform to program the workflows and the logic and the escalation necessary to make sure that issues that come up or patient conditions that are alarming, that either the right maintenance department gets it or a physician's notified or a nurse is notified that they have a condition to respond to. This is the Swiss Army knife, if you will, of alert management. It interfaces to over 200 systems. It has a rules-based engine that allows us to establish escalation processes and who to communicate and in what timeframe to do it in, and is a incredibly valuable platform. Spok's e.Notify is an incident management system, another form of critical communications.
If the lab has a chemical spill, there's a HAZMAT protocol, and there are key people in the organization that must be notified, and there's a protocol that must be followed. In systems like this, you can pre-stage those type of incidents and then immediately activate that, and it notifies all the appropriate people. It also tracks their response, so you know they were notified, but did they respond? Because if they didn't respond, I need to go escalate that to the next available resource. These can be very complex and range from a clinical environment like a lab spill, a infant abduction, a security incident, even IT outages.
If you have an outage of a system in IT, you wanna alert only the people that are responsible for that system, and you can pre-configure those type of things in a system like this to make sure that those folks are notified and that you can track and manage that incident to make sure people are responding correctly. Value-added services. This is a win-win for everybody because this is where our folks go in to work with our customers to see how they're doing, a health check, if you will, to talk to them about their challenges that they're having in communications and understand how they can improve or solve those challenges.
We not only, work with them and understand and listen to their issues and desires, we look at each module, and we understand how they're using it and whether they're using it correctly, whether we can make improvements out of it. I talk about having a product roadmap, this is how we translate our product roadmap and what they have and what they're gonna have in these, especially these, multi-year managed services agreements, a customer roadmap of what we can do to help improve their system, additional workflows we can add, additional products that we can add to the suite to address different issues.
These services are absolutely critical for our customers to maximize the value that they get out of their investment in the Care Connect suite, and to take on the challenges that they have. I'm gonna switch now and talk about the roadmap, the Care Connect roadmap. This is the inputs to that process, on the far left at the bottom, you see voice of the customer, and obviously, that's one of the most important inputs to any roadmap, is what do our customers ask for. I'll tell you right now, we've had relationships with our customers for decades. We have tremendous relationships with our customers, and that helps because they are not bashful. They will share all their wants and desires and their frustrations. They have no problem.
I can't tell you how many of them, I'll go visit a customer, and they know the manager of our support group. They'll tell jokes about a conversation they had with them. We're part of their team, and we listen. Not only do we listen from a sales point of view, but from our professional services, our support people. Every inch of the company, as we engage our customers, we ask for feedback, and certainly they offer it. That's a key input to that process. Obviously, the competitive landscape, we pay very close attention to what else is happening in the industry and make sure that we stay in front of our competition. We have our own product vision and business strategy, obviously, that is a overarching. You know, we wanna stay in our lane.
We want to expand and deliver more value, but we don't wanna lose focus. We look at our own strategy and ask ourselves when we're faced with an opportunity to go in another direction, does that really fit in the business plan and strategy that we have? Technology lifecycle management. We're also at the mercy of Microsoft and Oracle and other technology vendors and the products they have. Cybersecurity is a big deal everywhere, but especially in healthcare. We cannot allow our customers to have operating systems, databases, and third-party software that is no longer supported, isn't getting security patches, and those type of things.
We have a very complex method of tracking what all those third-party components are in software, what their lifecycle is, so that that plays a big role in when we do upgrades and changes with those components to make sure that our customers have everything fully supported in their environment. Implementations, upgrade, support, and integration. Every release has a component in it where we take input from our support, our professional services, and they tell us, "We're having trouble with upgrades in this one little area." We constantly improve how we do upgrades and installs and integrations to third-party components. That's a component that comes into that product roadmap. Customers, they sometimes do things we never thought you could do with our products.
They'll occasionally do something pretty remarkable, and we work with them to understand what they did. We typically are asked to help do something different with the product to make it easier for them to do it. Then we take those, and we make that part of our product and make other customers aware of what they can do and what some customers have done that they may be interested in doing as well. That's a lot of input and process, but it's really not as daunting as it looks. Those are all key elements to make sure we focus on the right things on the roadmap. A specific area of focus is it's really reduce the lifecycle cost for our customer. I think we talked a little bit about healthcare today.
There's a lot of financial pressures and changes that they're going through. They ask us to do our part, and we're a strategic partner with these folks. We're sensitive to that. We also look at this as a way for us to be able to optimize our platform. We look at how we can impact lifecycle costs as well as enhance our products. We want to eliminate hardware dependencies. We're telephony-based. Telephone systems have often still had copper circuits. We had special equipment that had to go into the servers to connect to those telephony lines.
That creates a big problem for a data center that's trying to make all of their solutions into their virtual cloud of their own, because now all of a sudden, these servers can't be treated the way the rest of the servers in that institution are. We've worked hard as the technologies allowed us, and now are moved to SIP or the digital telephone circuits, and no longer, and wherever possible, eliminating any hardware dependencies that prevent us from allowing our solution to fit into the infrastructure of our customers. Server consolidation from our reduces implementation and upgrade costs, so, it's being received very, very well, and it's making Spok much more efficient at the same time. From a release themes and the products, what are we doing with our Care Connect software?
First and foremost, we wanna refresh the user interface. We have web-based applications. We have desktop. In general, time moves on. There's new techniques. Reducing the clicks is always important, making your solution as agile as you can, refreshing those user interfaces and providing those more advanced features is a key part of what we're focused on. I have never seen an information system that I said, "I don't need any more information. I have plenty of reports." Well, there were no exception, but we are very focused on providing as much robust information for our customers and putting it in their hands to do analysis with so that they can look at their critical communications. We've, in fact, are delivering new dashboard platforms and reporting tools across the Spok Care Connect suite. Deeper clinical integration.
The EMR, I spent years of my life rolling out and working with doctors and nurses on electronic medical records. You know, at first, I had to wear riot gear into the room to keep from being murdered for putting those things on them. Later on, to find out you couldn't tear it out of their hands, the feedback was. The more that we can take that passive record and activate it, create actions, make sure that if there's critical information in there, that we notify the appropriate folks of that information so that they can act. Expand enterprise support. With the pressures and the financial pressures, we're seeing more and more hospitals have their call center move from a hospital to a region or even corporate, where they're handling multiple hospitals out of a single call center.
To do that, we have to have data organized in certain ways, so it's very easy for those, for all users of the Spok Care Connect system to be able to sort that data by facility, by practice, by all of the different ways that you end up having a much more complicated environment when all of a sudden this is an enterprise application that's spanning multiple hospitals. We're currently a leader in CTI and PBX integration. We integrate to Avaya, Cisco, and I could go on and on and on. A lot of on-premise vendors. There's over 22 cloud vendors now that are coming out of the woodwork. They don't have much of the market right now, but there's a lot of interest because they have a cost advantage in some cases.
Us maintaining our leadership position means we have to pay attention to these new trends and develop mechanisms to make sure that we support our customers whichever direction they tend to go from a PBX and a primary call center technology point of view. Client configuration options. You know, you don't wanna put a customer in a complex environment like this without giving them the ability to control their own destiny. As more and more, as we look at our products, we find ways that our customers can configure some of these complex workflows without having to engage Spok's professional services. Our customers are responding, very well to that. All in all, faster time to market. This is a change we made last year.
The type of software releases we do, it was briefly discussed earlier, the major infrastructure upgrades are every three to four years. Those are operating system, databases, major third-party components. This is a heavy lift. It's a big job. It's not unique to us. Any on-premise software has to be upgraded. We don't wanna do it more often than necessary. We then move to feature releases, and they used to be annual, but we moved them to every 6 months. Now when customers, we're working with them, we have a lot of interest in new capabilities and new features, we now have the ability to create those features, and they don't have to wait one year. They have to wait six months maybe. This accelerates their ability to realize benefits out of that. Of course, software patches as needed.
This really, combined with the three year managed services that has the upgrades included. It's really designed with those specialized services, around their needs, and the, as I said before, kind of the customer's roadmap of what we wanna do with them, with our solutions to improve what they have, we're allowing our customers, the ability to much more rapidly get ROI out of their investment in Spok Care Connect suite. Now, John.
Good morning. Thank you, Tim. We're gonna jump right in and talk a little bit about our initiatives for 2023, because for me, these initiatives are our roadmap for success for the year and the out years as well. I'm gonna talk about a few of these throughout this presentation. I know some I've already talked about. We talked a lot about the GenA product. We're gonna talk a lot about cross-sell collaborations and value-added services as well. I think you'll see some of the things that we're gonna talk about are pretty exciting for the team. First thing I wanna talk about is I really wanna say how fortunate we are to have such an amazing group of people on the sales team and in our company as an organization.
We currently have 29 quota-carrying reps. Those span across the software team, the wireless team, the business development team. In addition to that, we have a passionate operations team that helps make sure the salespeople get all the information they need, make sure our quotes and our order forms are accurate, make sure that we're protecting both the customer and the business with each one of these that we do. Our sales engineering team, they are heroes in this group. They not only make sure that what we're quoting is accurate, but they're also making sure what the customer is getting is exactly what they need to get to make sure the engagement goes off really well. Our value-added services group, small, it's 2 people in this group that help drive the services piece that gives our customers such great benefits.
From the software side, I wanna talk a little bit about on the left, you'll see we have 1,850 total customers. Of that, it's in over 2,200 locations. You look in the blue, the blue screen, it's 847 wireless-only customers. On the bottom, software-only customers, we have 486. The combination of the two is 345 or 21%. This is a huge opportunity for us to go after a big group of people that are already paying us for something. We are building this both column up. Every month, we're adding to this, and we're gonna continue to let this grow. If you look on the other side, that's our market share. For the 1-199 beds, we have a very small footprint, roughly 5%.
Our subscription model that Tim's alluded to, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about in upcoming slides, is really what we think can help us win a lot more of that space. From the 2-599 beds, 30% of that market, over 382 customers. The 600 beds, we have over 50% of that market. We're also gonna talk a little bit about how we're gonna attack that as well, and a lot of it has to do with our multiyear engagements that I know you've heard a lot about already this morning. The first thing that we're gonna talk about is the multiyear engagements. I know you've heard a lot from everybody that's been up here that's talked about it. We think this is a huge asset to our business.
Our customers are protected from a financial perspective with a very predictable spend over the course of this term. We're guaranteeing that they're getting our latest current software that we want them to have over that same span. It also allows us to add additional licensing for them to get more of our products out there and our value-added services group to help make sure it's optimized. These are very valuable to us. Customers tend to love these because they're not getting surprised throughout the term with something additional added that they may have needed. It's all inclusive of these agreements. Our small hospital strategy, as I alluded to earlier, with the one to 199 beds, this is our new subscription offering.
We see a lot of the challenges we have in that space is upfront capital or small IT departments that don't necessarily have the resources to install our products. This particular solution's gonna allow us to host it ourselves in Plano and give them easy access. With the subscription model, they pay us a monthly price, no upfront capital. They don't need a big IT department because we send them basically links after we sign these deals that they can click on and have immediate access to it. This is also scalable, where we're gonna start off with a messaging on-call and a web directory package. For however many operators they have, we can add individual operator console seats as well. They can start off small and grow it based upon size.
This is a second half initiative, we're not gonna see a lot of success on this until late second half, we're excited about what this is gonna bring for us. Channel partner is another area that we're spending a lot of time building. We think we can more than double our channel partner growth over the next 12-24 months, and we're gonna do that by prioritizing the top partnerships, build more strategic relationships, which we're working on today, and conducts business reviews. Not just conduct business reviews, do account mapping with them. Many of our partners have hundreds of salespeople out in the field. We know that we can maximize that with our solution, our team, as well as their team, and continue to train and educate on the value of what Spok brings to the table.
As we start offering these new solutions with the subscription model, some of the easier to install, upgrades to our current solutions, these are a great fit for many partners out there in the field. We changed our strategy in APAC in 2022 by bringing on a partner in technology who's a very big partner over there, and they're doing much of our work for us. They are managing the Spok relationships. They are managing our maintenance. They are doing our sales, and they're doing our services while they're over there. We regularly speak with them, work with them as far as customer trainings.
We're having a roadshow in July, bringing a couple of our people out there to talk to some of the big customers in the hospital space for them. We think this is gonna grow big for us in the next year to two years. The key products they're gonna work on is what you've seen a lot of this morning, Spok Messenger, our console piece, and our mobile messaging as well. I wanna talk a couple of the wins that we received this year so far. One of them is a major hospital in the Northeast. They've been with us, believe it or not, 43 years. It's incredible amount of time. As you see, they have over 18,000 pagers in service.
Of 2,000 of those are GenA, they're a premium maintenance customer, which we'll talk a little bit about the software aspects of this as well. If you look to the wheel to the right that Tim mentioned, when we highlight some of the things that they utilize and change colors on some of the things they don't have yet, their deal that we just closed with them is in, is in the dark blue, which we'll show on the next slide. Some of the other opportunities that are in use today that we're working on now for upgrades are in the teal and the gray or light gray is stuff they don't necessarily have in place today. They have a whopping 272,000 messages a month through our console. That's a huge number.
Tim talked a little bit about our speech services. If you look at the 44,000, it's 44,000 messages that are self-service, so the operators are not being tasked to touch those 'cause that's being done for them, which is helping them really focus on the things that are more important for them. 14,000 web messages as well. It's another area of self-service that they can reach out to docs on their own and get some answers without having to involve anybody else, and that saves time. They have 600 code notifications a month. Seconds count with codes, and they have 600 a month going on average. It's just really big numbers. What was the deal?
Well, this is a three-year multi-year engagement for them, which primarily was driven by security functionality, as Tim talked about, making sure all of our solutions are up to date and the most secure that they can be. We also added the new speech solution, which you also heard about. As you saw in the previous slide, they use a significant amount of self-service speech. Of the applications. We did also have some value-added services to help better optimize the solutions that they use today and help us grow that by tomorrow. On the right side, you see how much the value of the deal was. The total company value was almost $1.5 million. The sales booking value was $571,000. The difference is the maintenance over the terms of those two years that are not considered a booking value.
If you look inside that, there's software that was sold, there was professional services, hardware, and additional maintenance. Great deal for the customer, great deal for Spok, and it's opening up the door for us for significantly more opportunities down the road, which are down the bottom. A Spok Messenger expansion, adding in nurse calls, adding in more enterprise console for other areas that are not necessarily the operators' areas, and wireless GenA growth, which we're working on with them today. Great opportunity that we sold, great customer, as you can see, there's a lot more coming from this particular customer as well. Another one we closed in the Midwest, they've been a customer since 2008. They do over 100,000 messages a month. Of that, 224 of those are codes.
They, 40 workstations, so they're a bit smaller than the previous one, but they also purchased the value-added service as well to help optimize that. If you look to the right in the teal, that's what they utilize today from us, and there's a lot of white space as well for this particular customer. This one is also driven primarily by security and some of the additional functionality that our solutions offer. They also. We had to go against a group of people over there that tried to displace us with a small group from Cisco with a very small call center manager. That did not go well. As you see, they signed back on for us, and we are now also in communication to sell them more, as you see at the bottom in some of these future opportunities with our middleware.
The deal breakdown on this one, $935,000 for the $523,000 sales booking value. There's a lot of things in here. Maintenance, which is managed service maintenance. I mean, managed service services, I'm sorry. Future upgrades, third-party components, value-added services. There was a lot that was in this order, and again, a lot more coming down the line. Now, our value proposition, as I think you've heard a lot, is making sure that we improve patient outcomes. As you see, the care team communication piece, making sure that our consoles can send those messages quickly and efficiently to care teams and know that all of them are gonna get the message.
Our efficient clinical workflows, well, we do that through our middleware, our Spok Messenger solution that makes sure that the right message is getting to the right person at the right device, and it's filtered so that we're not sending the wrong things to the wrong people. Lastly, the enterprise call processing, where, as you can see, we can send messages right from the clinician's fingertips, and they're sure that that's gonna get to the right people. How does Spok Care Connect set us apart? Well, first of all, we're a healthcare-grade enterprise platform. We have the ability to help put into one site, and we can scale to hundreds of sites, which is enormous. We have an extensive interoperability that Tim Tindle talked about with hundreds of integrations. Why is that valuable? Because most hospitals have very disparate solutions that don't talk to anybody else.
Our middleware and our console can bring that all together to make sure that even though they're a disparate solution, that they do get the messaging to the right people. Our directory, which is the single source of truth in many hospitals, is the heart of their communication platform, touches everybody in the building, whether it's the CEO, whether it's the valet, everybody is in that directory. Yes, we can filter that out so the wrong people aren't messaging their own people. We're device agnostic, so anybody that has a device that can take a message, we can get a message out to them.
Lastly, as you heard, security is huge for us, and every one of these upgrades has some level of security upgrade that's keeping us current and keeping us with the times to make sure that not only Spok is protected, but our customers are protected as well. With that, I'd like to introduce Calvin.
Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. All right. Good morning, everybody. I'm just going to spend two slides going through some of the financial highlights over the last year and for the first quarter. just wanted to start off by kind of summarizing these first three bullet points, which Vince had mentioned earlier. We initiated this strategic shift in our business plan early last year, largely completed it in the second half, we've seen great success in pretty much all areas from a cost savings perspective, and we are really looking to the future towards driving that top line.
This was proved out in our $24.5 million of pro forma Adjusted EBITDA that we generated in 2022, and a return of about $25 million in capital return to shareholders last year, with another $6.9 million delivered here in the first quarter. We released earnings yesterday, and we went through our earnings call this morning, and we provide a lot more details on these numbers in both of those. I'd highly suggest if you hadn't had a chance to go and revisit those.
I do wanna highlight one number here in particular for the quarter ended, March 31st, Adjusted EBITDA was $6.9 million for the first quarter of 2023, and that is in comparison to negative $2.1 million in the first quarter of 2022. A clear reversal really shows that we've had significant success in executing that strategic plan, and we expect that to continue forward. As I mentioned earlier, $6.9 million was returned to shareholders through our regular dividend in the first quarter. We're operating with about $29 and a half million of cash on the balance sheet as of the end of the first quarter, and no debt.
Some highlights from the first quarter, again. This will be a reoccurring theme, wanting to highlight the $6.9 million of Adjusted EBITDA that we drove through in the first quarter. We were very pleased with those results. Software operations bookings, which you heard from John and Vince earlier as well, we increased that almost 9% from last year with 15 six-figure contracts. Wireless revenue, very impressive for the first quarter. Units and churn, units and service, the churn was only down to 3.2%, continuing to be at the lowest levels we've seen in many years, with ARPU actually growing up to $7.59 or about 4.8% over where it was last year.
Finally, Vince went through it, we increased our financial guidance for the full year of 2023. Just comparing for a second where we were at last year for pro forma and the midpoint of our guidance for Adjusted EBITDA for 2023. On the right, where you see 2023, that's the midpoint of our updated financial guidance at $25.5 million. Last year we drove about $15 million in Adjusted EBITDA, when you account for some of those costs that we removed related to Spok Go that were really here in the first half, some of the terminated employees, some of the non-payroll costs, and outside services, we had a pro forma Adjusted EBITDA of $24.5 million. Really about a growth of $1 million to that number.
From a balance sheet highlight perspective, we have an exceptionally clean and simple balance sheet. You know, our three major assets, cash, goodwill, and deferred tax assets. We have no debt, a very simple equity structure. We have only common stock. We have $29 .5 million of cash and equivalents at the end of the first quarter. I do want to just remind you that first quarter is typically our heaviest usage from a net working capital perspective. So while we did go down from the end of the year, we would anticipate to see similar levels, maybe even slightly up as we move through the rest of this year from a cash perspective. Finally, significant deferred tax assets. So we anticipate being able to shelter that earnings and that generation of income from taxes for many years to come.
With that, I'll pass it back on to Vince to go through capital allocation.
Thank you, Calvin. Important to shareholders always is a discussion on capital allocation, It's pretty simple here at Spok. You know, rule number one is the money that we're generating belongs to you, our shareholders, and our job is to return it to you. It's a strategy we used to employ with incredible success, and we've come back to it. In many respects, it kinda feels like coming home again. It feels good. We're good at it. We're gonna keep doing it. Rule number one is we're gonna generate capital and return it to our shareholders. There's a lot of things companies can do with their capital, right? You know, one of them is they can pay down debt. We don't do that because we don't have any debt, We don't have to worry about that.
I just told you rule number one is returning capital to shareholders. There's a couple ways you can do that, dividends and distributions to the shareholders, or you can do share repurchases. We've chosen to do the former and not the latter. It's an art, not a science. We just think longer term it'll be better for our shareholders if we pay that dividend, potentially at some point in the future even increase that recurring dividend. There's an internal investment you can make. You can spend money on CapEx, you can spend money on R&D. You know, our CapEx is pretty predictable, and most of it's for pagers, so that's fairly simple. I think you saw this morning with respect to what we're spending in R&D, in Tim's category, that we're really getting a good return on that.
You've seen it with the results that John has got in terms of sales. You see these customers signing these multiyear agreements. Very, very good for our long-term prospects, 'cause that's gonna lower our churn in the future. We're gonna continue this strategy of generating capital and returning it. You know, M&A is out there. It's not a current priority or not a current focus. That goes in both directions. You know, we're doing a lot of good things right now. People reach out to us. I had two unsolicited outreaches yesterday. Who knows what'll happen in the future? That's something that the board is, you know, open-minded to, and we'll take a look at that. Companies acquire, you know, companies. We're not currently looking at acquiring a company.
If there would be an acquisition that could support the return of capital, i.e., it had amount of revenue associated with it and we could get a lot of synergies out of it and generate even more cash, it might be something we'd consider. Again, it's not the focus right now. Remember, rule number one is to return capital to shareholders, so please don't take away the wrong message, you know, with respect to that. Just want you to know that we're open-minded on all this. Again, you know, I said we have a good track record of doing it. We've been doing this since 2004 when we formed the company. This quarter, we're gonna bust through $1 billion of free cash flow generated. We've returned the overwhelming majority of that capital to our shareholders over many years, 20 years.
Guess I'm getting old, been around a while. You know, we've paid off all the debt we had when we formed the company. We did an acquisition, of Amcom, and we've got about $30 million of cash on the balance sheet now. Look, we threw a lot at you this morning. There's a lot of information, a lot of data. I saw many people taking notes and taking pictures and all. We will put the deck up on the investor website. You guys will have access to the deck. Don't be concerned about that. I think we'll even file it with the SEC. Is that correct? Look, that was a lot of information. I kinda look at this fairly simply and straightforward.
Our wireless business, you know, when I looked at the numbers, through April, on a trailing twelve-month basis, the churn in our wireless business a year ago, April, was 4.2%. On a trailing twelve-month basis, the churn in terms of units and service in our wireless business through this April was 3.3%. We just told you we're getting more average revenue per unit with the GenA pagers as that base grows out there, and we're considering another price increase. You have to ask yourself, how much can their wireless revenue really go down? Right? I mean, if you weren't gonna do anything with your average revenue per unit, and you're going down at 3.3% on wireless, it's gonna go down about 3.3%.
If you're getting higher average revenue per unit on units that you're putting out compared to units that are coming off, that's gonna mitigate that 3.3%. If you can do some successful price increases, that further mitigate it. I think that cash flow revenue flywheel wireless is gonna do just fine. It's gonna be around for a long time. You know, on the software side, I think it's pretty simple. The way I look at it is, you know, last year we did about $24.5 million of software operations bookings. This year, we're going to do more than that, but the amount that we're gonna do this year isn't anywhere close to what we were doing pre-pandemic, pre-Spok Go.
Do I think we'll be able to get back to that level with these investments that Tim talked about that we're making, and as our customers get a little more wind in their sails? Absolutely. We're gonna climb back to those levels at some point in the future. I think this is a pretty good business. I don't think there's a whole lot of downside right now. I think we're looked at by our customers as almost a utility. They gotta have us, and they've proven that. I think we're in a really good position here at Spok. I don't think it's rocket growth, you know, through the moon, but I think it's very profitable. Right now it's yielding about, what, 10% or something like that in terms of dividend.
I think we're in a really, really good place, and it's a fairly straightforward business and not to be overly complex. Again, we'll put the deck up there. We appreciate you guys coming to the meeting today and those that are participating on the web. Thank you. Take a little bit of time now and the management team is available to answer your questions, and Al's gonna take questions from the internet as well. We're gonna break. We'll come back at noon. Okay. Oh, you wanna do it at noon? Yeah. Okay. What Are we gonna do lunch? Yeah, we're gonna do lunch. Okay. We got lunch. You can ask us questions at lunch too, but the people just won't be able to hear it online.
Thank you. The floor is open for questions if folks in the room wanna kick it off with some questions, and then we'll go to the folks that are participating online. Al, you wanna kick it off with some online questions?
Questions.
Oh, go ahead, Steve. Yeah.
The working capital, I think, Calvin, you might have talked about or Mike, just early in the year. How does that work seasonally in terms of EBITDA and free cash flow maybe being the biggest gap in the first quarter?
Yeah, sure. In the first quarter, we have a bunch of traditional networking capital-heavy items. Think your prepaid, your big annualized subscription contracts, Salesforce, and those types of things, where the full cash is going out the door and the expense is being amortized across the period. You've got things like bonuses, some compensation items, things like that traditionally are heaviest in the first quarter. You're generally in a negative networking capital position, relative to your Adjusted EBITDA. More cash is going out the door than what Adjusted EBITDA is coming in, and that's where we see kind of the drop from the end of the year to the first quarter cash balance.
As I mentioned earlier, with an expectation that cash would likely be at similar levels, maybe even slightly up through the remainder of the year, you kind of see that reversing, where our Adjusted EBITDA is ultimately equaling or higher than the cash flows going out the door, for each of those quarters going forward.
Okay. I'll do a question from the webcast. I'm gonna start with the elephant in the room as the person described it, that's the inclusion in the Russell. Obviously, a couple of years ago, it had a big impact when we were delisted. What's your expectation this year, especially with the new market cap requirements?
Look, I mean, we've talked to several people about this. I mean, we think the current requirement's gonna be $150 million for a market cap. We're significantly higher than that right now. We're well up in the list. You know, they're gonna reconstitute the list. We'll see the list, I think, on May 19th. Al, is that right? We expect we'll be in there. I think the actual reconstitution happens on June.
June 23rd.
23rd. Yeah, that's coming. I think that's probably people figured that out by now.
Okay. I'll continue on. I have a set. This was a multi-part question, one on wireless, one on software. I'll start with wireless. What kind of retention did you see after the price increase? What was th increase in price in 2022, and do you expect to increase prices in 2023? What percentage of the pagers are GenA? What's your expectation for GenA growth over the next three years? The last question for wireless was, do you only offer the GenA pager, or do you still offer the legacy pager?
It's a lot of questions, but basically, we did the price increase in the third quarter last year, about 3% across about 70% of our base. We had virtually no pushback. We didn't lose a customer over it. We expect to do another price increase this year in the third quarter, at a percentage that we'll figure out, and we'll let you know when we do it. We don't expect we're gonna get a lot of pushback there either. GenA, with respect to percentage of our base, I think through the end of April, we had just over 13,000 units in service at that higher RPU I gave you. That's 13,000 across an 800,000 base. We expect that's gonna continue to grow.
We got a big initiative on in the company to get those out. We wanna maintain the discipline of getting the higher average revenue per unit. What, Demis?
Yeah. No. I think for GenA, it's a function of us learning what's the right volume price elasticity match there. How long do we keep it at the higher price? Do we bring it down in order to get more volume out there? Those are the things that we're working with John and his team on the sales side to kind of try some different pricing strategies that make sense.
As far as the number of devices that we currently ship, in addition to GenA, we have the T5, which is a one-way paging device, very similar. It's just the 90s vintage version of it. We have a numeric pager that we ship, and then we have our ReadyCall line, which is more of a waiting room oriented. We have two different pagers for that. We have multiple products that we do ship in the paging line.
One of the reasons our CapEx is so low is, you know, obviously we have a lot of pagers going out the door every month to customers. We have a lot of pagers coming in the door every month from customers, and we refurbish those pagers. We get a very high yield on refurbishing those pagers, and then we put them back out in the market. Pagers are incredibly resilient devices. They don't cost a lot. There's not a whole lot of complicated parts inside them other than the circuit board. We're able to reuse and repurpose a lot of those, and that keeps our CapEx down.
Did we hit them all? I don't know if we hit them all.
I think you got them all.
Do you want me to continue?
Yeah.
Anybody else? No. Okay. Why don't we switch to software? Of the four new new logo deals that you talked about, were they all competitive displacements? The second part of that was talking about bookings. Do you have an expectation of where you think bookings levels will come in for the year for 2023? Could you talk a little about your go-to-market strategy vis-à-vis the hosted solution for the small and midcap, which you did, but some follow-up on that? Then on maintenance levels, what's your expectation to when we would see maintenance levels return to historical levels?
Do we have an expectation on bookings growth for this year? Yes. That's the answer to that. You know, not to be cute about it, but I think I said during the presentation, we did about $24.5 million last year in software operations bookings. That doesn't count maintenance bookings. We will improve upon that this year, and we'll continue to improve upon that in future periods. John, you wanna take the part about the competitive view?
Yeah. On the four new logos, it was a combination of competitive takeaways as well as just additions to people who haven't had any solutions at all.
You wanna do the maintenance, Mike?
Yeah, the maintenance question, Al. What was that? Oh, when is it gonna grow?
When it will grow back.
Yeah. Maintenance growing is more a function of bookings increasing, especially licensed bookings at the end of the day. The other piece of that is as we do more multiyear engagements, so the 3-year deals, it's going to inherently bring down the gross churn that we see in the maintenance business just because you're locking people in for a longer period of time. The last piece of that is a function of some of the things that Tim talked about. As we continue to make the Spok Care Connect more robust with more enhancements and features, the need or the want of some of those customers that might actually churn from a maintenance perspective won't be there, right? There'll be more features and more functionality in the Spok Care Connect.
Over time, our expectation is that a combination of less gross churn and higher bookings is going to lead to higher ultimate maintenance revenue.
I'll continue on. This is a two-part question. The first has to do with dividends. How do you determine the dividend level? The second part has to do with cash. How long until you cover the dividend with your until you can stop funding it from cash or a portion of it? What's your expectation for the cash balance at the end of 2023?
Calvin answered the part on the cash balance at the end of 2023. It's gonna be at this level or higher by the end of the year 'cause we don't have as much working capital needs in the last three quarters of the year. How we set the dividend, it was a result of conversation and deliberation with the board, the management team, and our investment advisors, specifically at Piper. You know, it's an art, not a science. When we set the dividend, you know, we were looking at covering 80% of it with our cash flow, which would have been about $20 million in the dividend instead of $25. We had a lot of cash on the balance sheet, so the rest we were gonna supplement with the cash on the balance sheet.
Obviously, since we set the dividend, our cash flow has grown. It's higher than that 80%. We're on the way to covering it. We think we'll cover it, as Mike said, in the next 18-24 months. I'd like to see it sooner. I think we're in good shape, you know, for paying the dividend for a long time to come.
A follow-up on that dividend question. The dividend in Q1 was reported at $6.9 million, with the 20 million shares roughly, at $0.3125. Why was that $6.9? They would have calculated more to be in the $6.25 million range.
In the first quarter, dividends paid typically tends to be higher, and that's really a factor of accrued dividends which relate to existing stock compensation for the long-term incentive plan. That gets paid out in arrears. We would typically expect that to come down with shares outstanding for the second through the fourth quarters.
Okay. I'll continue on. Had a question, Vince, about acquisitions. You touched upon that. Are you actively looking in any area? Any names on the screen?
No names on the screen. We're not actively looking. As you can imagine, in this environment, there's a lot of people shopping their companies. They send CIMs to us. We take a look at everything, but, you know, it's not on our target. We haven't brought anything to our board of directors, which obviously we would do if we were interested in something. Nothing on the radar right now.
Okay. A question that came in for Mike and Calvin related to R&D spend levels. Would you expect that to steady-state at pre Spok Go levels?
Yeah. I mean, at a high level, we, in 2022, we probably had eight and a half million dollars or so of R&D spend. We expect it to be closer to $11 million, maybe a little less than that, in 2023. As we go through our normal long-range planning process, we'll determine what we wanna do as far as the work that we need to do in order, whether it be technical debt, enhancements, etc . It'll certainly be higher than what it was in 2022, at the eight and a half. It'll probably be in the kind of $10 million-$11 million range. Again, we have to set that based upon what our goals are. I t will be higher than what it was in 2022, and generally consistent with
This year, which should be around probably 10.5 - 11.
Yeah. If I would just add to that, the eight and a half that Mike referenced was the portion of R&D from last year that was specifically related to CCS. Our total R&D spend, I think was about $15 million-$17 million, of which obviously included quite a bit related to Spok Go from the first half.
Yeah. Wax.
Okay. I got a question. Can you touch on opportunities in emergency management area, fire, police, government agencies? Who do you compete with there? What needs to happen to be able to make this a larger percentage of the business? Who are the incumbents, and what are the barriers to getting into this market?
We are primarily focused on healthcare right now. That's where that R&D spend is going. If we wanted to focus more on emergency services or we wanted to focus more on, you know, police departments and municipalities, we would have to increase our R&D spend and update some of those products. It's just not a big focus for us right now. Having said that, a lot of our software, with very minor modifications and adjustments to it, can be used in large enterprise. It's used in, still to this day, in casinos, in big hospitality areas. You know, Disney uses it. Other big customers use it. It can be repurposed, but we're not putting a lot of R&D investment in that. That's not where we see our future right now.
Tim, do you wanna add anything to that?
That market is being driven by a lot of regulatory change right now with NextGen 911. For us to truly go after that market would require a decision for a significant increase in investment to modernize the current products that we have serving a portion of that market. We'll continue with the products we have, but have chosen not to add that additional R&D to the expense.
That's it from the web for now.
Okay. During the breakout, one other question and comment we got from an investor, just, they were very pleased to this extra information we disclosed, particularly Tim's part on what we're doing with R&D and John on the sales. We're thinking about doing another deep dive like this maybe in the fall, get some more progress, get some more quarters under our belt, and then come back and do this again in the fall. Maybe share a little bit even more what we're doing. You know, we don't wanna go too, you know, too overboard because you've already spent two hours with us, and we really appreciate the investment and time you've made in this company. Thanks everyone for showing up today. We really appreciate it.
I do have another question.
Oh, okay.
If you don't mind. The question came in, any update on international markets, Australia, Canada, England, Asia, etc. ? When, what year do you think we will start to see significant business outside the U.S.A.? Will that be wireless, software, or both?
Was that the email I sent to John last week? Go ahead. Go ahead, John.
Yeah. In Australia, we're working with a partner that I talked about in technology, and we're doing some road shows with them in July to help boost activity for them. Canada, we have a person on the ground in Canada that works for Spok, but additionally, we're bringing on a few new partners in Canada that we think will give us significant traction in the years to come. That was part of the channel partner piece that I talked about earlier. We expect to see that sooner, not later.
Just one last question. When are you gonna give your IR guy a raise?
Remember, remember rule number 1 about free cash flow? Look, folks, we're gonna talk to you again in late June when we release our second quarter numbers. As always, if you wanna talk to us on a one-on-one basis, feel free to give our IR guy who's overpaid a call, and he'll arrange it. I'll be in New York next week at EF Hutton conference. I've got a number of investor meetings scheduled for that. Again, Al will be with me if you wanna get ahold of him, if anyone's in town. Thank you very much for your investment and time, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter.
Thank you.