All right, well, good morning, and welcome to the Needham Growth Conference. My name is Joshua Reilly, and I'm an analyst on the enterprise software team here. Excited to have Tyler Technologies this morning, and CFO Brian Miller. Thanks.
Good to be here.
So Brian, maybe we can start off with an overview of Tyler, and maybe touch on what specific end markets your products serve as, as we, you know, those of us familiar with the story know that the mix has changed a bit over the last several years.
Yeah, sure. We're a vertical software company, focused exclusively on the public sector. Within the public sector, we're pretty broad in terms of both the sizes of government and the different levels of government that we serve. Excuse me. Historically, Tyler was really focused on the local government market, so primarily providing kind of mission-critical, back-end systems for local government, cities, counties, school districts, local agencies. We've, in more recent years, expanded more into the state government, especially through the acquisition of NIC, which was a large acquisition we did, coming up on three years ago. And a little bit in the federal space, again, through an acquisition that we did a few years ago. So today, we're probably 70%-75% local, maybe 20%-25% state, and 5% or so federal.
We're about 90%-98% domestic. Most of our international business is in Canada.
Got it. So one of the questions I get is about the health of your customer, which, as you just highlighted, is primarily local government entities and their ability to spend. So my work, and it's been pretty widely reported, is that local government budgets are the strongest that they've been in a long time. What do you think, if anything, could change that? And then do you expect any change to budgets in either direction in 2024?
Yeah, we've in general our commentary around the backdrop environment, it's been pretty strong over the last couple of years. And I think through the last year and recent quarters, it's been increasingly positive. Government budgets are in really pretty much at most levels in pretty solid shape. Obviously, there are a lot of different governments, and so each has a different situation. But generally, with local governments, property taxes are often their biggest single revenue stream, and those are not under much pressure right now. Generally, property values are pretty high, rates are pretty high.
They don't move in real time, so they're kinda slow to move, but those sources, sales taxes, income taxes, generally, most, licensing and permitting, those sorts of fees, are at pretty high levels. So we've said the market is definitely in terms of the activity we're seeing, the number of RFPs, the number of demos we're doing, all those kind of early-stage leading indicators of market activity are very strong. They're definitely at or above pre-pandemic highs. So, you know, a really active market. And for us, a very strong competitive position within that market. And the indications we see around 2024 budgets seem to be pretty consistent with what we're currently seeing. A lot of local governments have June year- ends.
I think 30-some of the states have June ends, and generally, the local governments follow that state year-end. So a lot of those are kind of in the early stages of starting to work on their budgets that'll go into place in the middle of the year, but most of the indicators we see seem to indicate a lot of stability at this kind of elevated level.
Got it. This kind of segues into the next question, which is, trying to understand the pipeline, and maybe can you give us a sense of how that looks on a YoY basis? I know that I've seen some data around ERP, RFPs that are pretty strong entering the year. Would you say that the pipelines across product lines are similar to entering 2023 or maybe even stronger?
Probably a little bit stronger. I mean, I think they strengthened through the year, and they were already, you know, on an uptick, as we recovered from... not from a lack of demand during COVID, but just the general disruption that slowed down processes, and everybody had to adapt to doing things differently. And there were a lot of distractions on government, so a lot of processes sort of paused for a while. But demand, actually, I think, coming out of COVID has increased because governments are increasingly seeing the need to have better systems, systems that support remote work, that typically wasn't a factor in most government operations, before. And you know, the ability to do more things online, provide more citizen self-service, all those things are drivers of replacing aging systems that have increased since COVID.
So yeah, I think, like I said, we're clearly at or above pre-pandemic highs across most of our product portfolio, and as we come into this year, I think the strength in the pipelines are at least at or above where they were a year ago.
Got it. So, some investors may not be familiar with the impact of the stimulus funds over the last couple of years to the industry. How would you summarize the impact of Tyler, and as those funds are fully allocated throughout 2024, do you foresee any impact to the business on the back end of that?
Yeah, I certainly think the federal stimulus is a factor in that market being really active and has been over the last couple of years. It's really hard to quantify exactly what the impact is, but just at a high level, the ARPA, the American Rescue Plan Act, provided for really significant direct aid to state and local governments. So about $360 billion of direct aid to state and local governments, and another, I want to say about $150 billion for schools. So a massive amount of stimulus going, really everybody gets something, pretty widely distributed and pretty flexible in terms of what they can use it on. Effectively, anything they would want to buy from Tyler would meet the requirements.
They have until the end of 2024 to commit the funds and until the end of 2026 to spend them. We believe that at this point, probably 75% or so of the funds have been committed, but that doesn't mean spent. So committed is sort of an internal commitment that they've said: "Okay, we're gonna use a certain amount of our ARPA funds to do X, Y, and Z." That doesn't mean they've even started the buying process, perhaps—if they're gonna use those funds to replace a software system or something like that. So we see each quarter, you know, maybe a large handful of deals that are specifically identified as being funded with ARPA funds.
But that doesn't mean that those deals wouldn't have taken place without the ARPA funds, so you can't necessarily say that's-
Right
... all incremental business.
Yeah.
And in other cases, funds are used for something else, which might free up money for an incremental spend with us. So we think it's a factor in the market being active. We don't think it's the biggest factor. We think it will continue to be a tailwind of some sort through 2026 as those funds are spent. But we don't think it's a you know like the biggest driver and that there's expected to be a big drop off once those funds are kind of all in the process.
To the extent that they use those funds, for example, to enter into a new SaaS agreement, they might be using those funds to pay for the first three years of the SaaS fees on a new ERP system, but there's a recurring engagement after that.
Right. Yep. No, that makes sense. So for those less familiar with the story, you're in the process of a cloud transition and getting all of your products on and ready for the public cloud. You have a partnership with AWS GovCloud, but can also support other public clouds as well. Can you just explain what's the process and an update in terms of where the products are at in this kind of transition?
Yeah, so we've had a sort of a long transition to the cloud that has accelerated in the last few years. So, for probably, gosh, probably almost 20 years, we offered—we had sort of a hybrid model. We were cloud neutral or cloud agnostic. We offered our products either in a traditional on-premise license and maintenance model, which most of our customers were adopting, and then started to offer products in a cloud model, a hosted model, basically in a Tyler private cloud, so hosted in one of two Tyler data centers. And so over a long period of time, that mix of new business gradually shifted towards cloud, but like a lot of things in government, they're very slow to embrace new things.
The adoption was very gradual, and so it was sort of a gradual transition that wasn't disruptive to our model. We still had strong growth and good cash flow, but over a number of years, customers, given the choice, started to move more towards the cloud. And 2019 was really the first year that more than half of our new business chose the cloud. And 2019 was also the year where we said, "We're kinda not cloud neutral or cloud agnostic anymore.
We're cloud first, and our future's in the cloud." We entered into our relationship with AWS to be a public cloud provider and said: We don't really wanna be in the data center business anymore, and started a process to move new customers into AWS and move out of our data centers and migrate our existing customers over. We also launched a bunch of projects to, on the development side, to optimize our products to be more efficiently deployed in the cloud. So most of our core products were originally built to be deployed on-prem, and so they weren't super efficient in the cloud. They consumed a lot of resources and were expensive to host in the cloud. So we've had projects underway to optimize those products and make them cloud efficient and lower our hosting costs.
During 2023, we released most of our cloud versions or cloud efficient versions of our products, and those that aren't there yet are pretty close. So, since 2019, we've gone from 50% of our new business choosing the cloud to now 85% in that range, choosing the cloud. We only really have a couple of product areas where we have any meaningful on-prem license business anymore. Public safety has been one that's been slower, with systems like 911 systems, slower to become comfortable with putting them in the cloud, although that's moving more rapidly there. And then in our federal and state business, we have a low-code development platform that's used for a variety of case management applications, and a lot of those agencies still choose licenses.
But most of our products, we don't even offer a license model anymore. And we also have projects underway now to... We're also very actively migrating our on-prem customers to the cloud. But if you look at our overall customer base today, in terms of dollars, about a third of those customers are in the cloud, and about two-thirds are still on-prem.
Got it. That's super helpful. So what's interesting about Tyler is that you serve one customer group, government, but you have a pretty broad product set with the number of product suites that you offer them. As you look at the competitive landscape, you know, I think you could argue that courts and justice has the strongest competitive position, and some other areas, like public safety, are a bit more competitive... How do you think about the competitive landscape and any updates to your thinking kind of entering 2024?
Yeah, you're right. We have a lot of products, that's one of our strengths, that Tyler does have by far the broadest set of product offerings for the public sector. And we have by far the biggest customer base of anyone serving the public sector. And those products, that breadth of products offers us a lot of opportunities for cross-sell and upsell. So we've talked about our average customer. We have about 13,000 different jurisdictions, so a distinct city, county, school district, agency. And we have about 40,000 installed systems or suites of products. So our average customer has two-three products from us and could have, in most cases, eight-10 products from us.
So there's a big cross-sell and upsell opportunity that comes with that customer base that we've put together over a number of decades. We have a lot of competition, but typically different competition in each product area, so there is no one company that has the breadth of products that's competing across all those. So typically our competitors are companies that are generally narrowly focused from a product perspective and even sometimes narrowly focused from a geographic perspective. So, you know, a company that just sells court systems in California or property tax systems in New York and New Jersey. So a lot of these are kind of legacy companies that historically served the space before Tyler sort of was put together and built what we've built.
So we have different competition in different segments. Most of these are again companies that are just focused on public sector, but just a niche. In a couple of areas, we see more horizontal competition, so in the ERP space, which is our biggest single product area, so accounting, human resources, payroll, we compete with horizontal companies like Oracle, SAP, Workday, Infor. Some of those larger ones we typically see mostly just in kind of the very high end of the market. They don't dip down as far.
Obviously, our strength there is that we are a vertical software company, so we go much deeper in terms of functionality that a government needs, as opposed to a healthcare company or a manufacturing company or a retail company or all of the different kinds of businesses that, that the horizontal companies serve. And then in the, in the federal and state space with our low-code platform, we compete with some of the, the horizontal companies like ServiceNow or Pegasystems or, or even Salesforce. You know, but again, we're focused just on government. We have prebuilt modules and applications that serve government functions. Not really a lot of changes, more recently in, you know, in the last couple of years around the competitive landscape.
There have been, in the last few years, a lot more private equity investments in our space, so we have a number of competitors in different niches that are PE-owned, and of course, those companies are always on some timetable of changing hands and so there's been a lot of activity there. It's going to be interesting to see kind of what happens with the next round of movements around some of these companies that were bought at peak valuations a few years ago. But yeah, we have a lot of competition, but generally, most of our major product areas, we're often the clear leader in those spaces and have very high win rates.
Have you seen any pullback in the PE-backed competitors since the interest rate dynamics have changed in kind of the last 12 months?
Yeah, it's a little hard to tell-
Or a little hard to tell.
in the short term, but clearly, you know, we know, you know, some of them, their debt is public and
Right
... their ratings reports, and there are some very highly leveraged companies out there that have very high interest rates. You know, you know, we have one major competitor that's, according to the S&P and Moody's reports, is leveraged at 10 or 11 times, and I see interest rates of 11%-12% on their debt. So it does seem like-
You would think at some point they have to pull back, right?
It would seem like that would make it very difficult to invest a lot in your products-
Right
... and R&D and the kinds of growth initiatives. You know, some of them have big backers, and we'll see. But generally, we've rarely found a PE-backed competitor become a tougher competitor during that ownership.
Yeah, after acquired. Awesome. So in terms of product innovation, what you've done with layering in data and insights use cases into the individual product suites seems to be kind of an incremental growth opportunity for you guys. What use cases in 2024 for data and insights are you most excited about in terms of actual, incremental revenue dollars added to the business?
Yeah, so we have, we did an acquisition of a company called Socrata a few years ago, which was a sort of a business analytics or a data and analytics platform designed, again, specifically just for government. And we have taken that technology and embedded it or created data and insights layers and applications on top of all of our core products. So, kind of serving a couple functions, providing better transparency to citizens. So things like, with our ERP system, open budget, open checkbook, kind of, making financial information readily available to citizens, how their government's spending their money. In the public safety area, applications for crime mapping and, you know, so you can-...
Go onto your town's website and draw a five-mile radius around your house and see, almost in real time, all the crime activity and get notifications, those sorts of things. So it's really created so both public transparency and then internal insights, so surfacing data to make and enable governments to make better decisions, better data-driven decisions, which, you know, this concept of business intelligence, not revolutionary in the private sector, but something that's still kinda new to government, where they have a lot of systems that are very siloed. So data sits in a silo, and it's very difficult to make decisions across departments or agencies. So we provide that now as, you know, sort of an add-on to our products.
But virtually every new software sale from our core products includes a data and analytics subscription now, because, and it's really provided us with a significant competitive edge in things like public safety, where we compete with, you know, companies like Motorola and Axon, and, you know, there's a number of good competitors there, but we think that the analytics capabilities we have really provide us with a strong competitive edge. So public safety is one of those areas where we're excited about how that's impacting our win rates and our competitiveness. We've also been able to use that technology, and I think, this is one of the areas where we've really been excited in very specific use cases, leveraging our state government relationships that came to us through the NIC acquisition.
And so taking that technology and being able to help our state government partners solve problems that they have. So I'll give you a real quick example. So in the state of Kansas, which is a big NIC state where they provide the website and portal access to most back-end state systems, the state also is a big Tyler property tax customer, so they all of the counties in Kansas use Tyler's property tax system. But each county has its own version of that, and so the state has a board that manages property taxes, but they didn't really have access to the data that sat in these, I think, 50-some county systems.
So, we were able to bring a solution to them with our data and analytics platform that is able to pull data together out of all of these systems and provide, give the state access and insights into what was going on in property taxes across the state in real time, and then also enables the counties to share data. So each county, you know, two counties might each have one Walmart distribution center, but that they're trying to value and tax, but they didn't have access to what the other guy was doing. And so, by being able to marry Tyler back-end systems, our state relationship, and our data and insights platform, we're able to solve a problem they have and generate a new revenue stream of, I think, $ several hundred thousand a year from that one application.
So, it's given us a lot of flexibility to go in and solve very specific problems for customers, and we have a number of states that have statewide property tax systems that we think we can replicate that same solution across.
Yeah, and theoretically, if the state level has insight into the county property tax, and they can aggregate that all up, they can-
Yeah.
They can develop their state budget more effectively, too-
Exactly.
Right? Like-
And it helps-
There's a bunch of benefits there.
Yeah, and it helps, again, make the Tyler solution more valuable and solidify that relationship, and, you know, we've got some really powerful technology on the analytics side that's helping us. And then the other thing, I guess we'll probably talk about AI at some point, everybody does. But we have—because we have so many systems and so many, so much data, or access to so much data in these state systems, that we have, you know, tremendous value in the data that's flowing through our systems that can help drive machine learning models and analytics. So we think, you know, that gives us an advantage as we start to integrate more AI into products.
Yeah, and there's significant opportunity there because if I kinda look at it today, government's a little bit of a lagging adopter, right? Particularly local government, lagging to adopt the cloud-
Yeah.
... probably lagging to adopt AI, although you guys might be able to make an impact on that, so. So for courts and justice, you, you know, those who are familiar with this story, you probably are aware they have a pretty dominant market position. What are you seeing in terms of the opportunity for statewide court opportunity contracts in 2024? And with the budget challenges in California, I know you have a number of counties there, for courts and justice. Do you foresee any disruption to their IT budgets with what's going on there?
Yeah, yeah, courts and justice is probably our most dominant product, especially case management, which is the core of courts. That's the system that manages all the aspects of a civil case, a criminal case, probate case, whatever. Scheduling the parties, the documents, you know, all the aspects of it, the electronic filing of documents. And we have, I think, roughly a 55% market share in the U.S., in terms of population of courts that use our system. We have 17 statewide court systems. We also have eight of the 10 largest counties in the country, Los Angeles, Cook County, Illinois, Dallas, Atlanta, places like that. And we have, I'd say, north of an 80% win rate over the last two decades, so we win most of the large deals that come along.
There still are a lot of legacy systems. So, for example, Cook County, there's one, Chicago, the second biggest court in the country. When we replaced their court system, it was a more than 40-year-old mainframe system that was built, you know, written in COBOL in the 1970s. So these are major projects. In terms of number of customers, it's not as many, but in terms of size and complexity, it's very big. In California, it's a state, it's not a statewide system, it's a county-by-county system, but we have the vast majority of that state using our system, including Los Angeles County, which just went live in November with their criminal court system with us. So these are multi-year implementations. Almost all those large, all the state systems and most of the large counties are still on-prem.
So there's a big opportunity for us to migrate those over the next few years to the cloud. I expect actually within, you know, I think in the next quarter or two, we'll have our first statewide court flip that'll move from on-prem to the cloud. Obviously, these are mission-critical systems, and when they need to be replaced, it's a high priority. I think there's a handful, I'd say, of states that are either in the very early stages of coming to market, or we expect them to fairly soon, you know, and soon in our space might be within the next year, 18 months. But I think there are some court, state court opportunities.
There haven't been any in the last couple of years that have, that have actually made decisions, but I think there's some opportunities coming along. Generally, but again, because of the mission-critical nature and most of these are, you know, recurring revenue streams, don't really see, you know, these are high priorities in terms of the budget, so, don't really see, impact from budget pressures, impacting that business. Where a lot of our growth is coming in the court space, because of, you know, it's probably our biggest single market share, the biggest product area where we have the largest market share. So while there'll be some new opportunities and new states that come out, more of our growth is really coming from areas around that core.
So we have this big market share in case management, but we also have a jury system, a prosecutor system, a probation system, a jail system, a system for civil process, serving papers, and an electronic filing system for the court. So all of those are upsell, cross-sell, add-on opportunities. So as those places that have our case management system may have someone else's jail system or someone else's jury system, that they also are legacy systems. And so as those systems age and need to be replaced, we're in a really strong position to be able to easily replace those because all of those solutions are integrated with Tyler. They're all in the cloud. So, you know, we should have, you know, what we like to think is an unfair advantage to sell that, to win that next deal.
Again, that's more of that, that cross-sell and upsell opportunity.
Yeah, and I think it's interesting to point out in courts and justice, you mentioned you have 17 statewide deals. I think there's maybe one or two other companies that have each one or two states.
Yeah.
And then it's all custom-
Yes
... developed solutions by consultants or third parties, right?
Yeah, most of these are old, old legacy custom solutions.
Yeah.
Because, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, well, 10 years ago, there was a Tyler, but 25 years ago, there wasn't a Tyler, so there wasn't an off-the-shelf court system that would work for any court of any size. So they all went out and had to build their own systems, and today, you just don't see that happening. There's a solution that's in the market like ours.
And I think, is it there's 40 states that have statewide-
Yeah, I think it's roughly 40 of the states that have statewide systems.
So that's kind of the opportunity longer term.
The other 10 states, which tend to be big states, Texas, Florida, California, Illinois, are county by county. Each county has its own court system, and in those, we typically have pretty dominant market shares.
Got it. So moving on to public safety, you—I think you mentioned the Naperville win, which is pretty impressive, given I think that it's the fourth largest city in Illinois, if I'm correct there.
It actually surprised me, but it is.
Yeah, yeah, it is interesting. So historically, you were a little bit down market in public safety relative to that. What's driving the tier... I don't know if you consider Naperville a tier one city, but what's driving the-
Yeah
... slightly larger, wins there?
Yeah, so we've been in the public safety market since 2015, 2016. We got in that through an acquisition. And since then, have made a lot of investments. And that business we acquired, a company called New World Systems, was very solidly in that mid-market space. Public safety is a pretty competitive market. The products there are really, there's kinda two major pieces. There's computer-aided dispatch or 911 systems, and then there's police, fire, and ambulance records management, so the systems that manage all the records and documents. And so the business we acquired was mostly kinda mid-market and had a number of competitors. Public safety is pretty well-funded.
You know, every cell phone bill, every phone bill has a line item on there where they're charging you $1 a month or something to fund public safety systems. Obviously, it's a high-priority area for funding as well and has a lot of impact on the public. So, it tends to be a well-funded area and, you know, a good number of competitors there. So post-acquisition, we really invested a lot in that product to continue to add features and functionality that make it more competitive at the higher end of the market, including a lot of investments around mobile technology. So, making the, you know, basically the entire dispatch system can work on-...
Apple Watch or an iPhone, as opposed to having to be tied to a terminal or a laptop in a police car. We also did another acquisition, for example, of a company that provides mobile citation capabilities. So when you get a ticket now, it's on an electronic device instead of a-
Handwritten.
Handwritten-
Yeah
... carbon paper. And so we've added a lot of capabilities there and have been able to be more successful in competing for bigger opportunities. Last year we won two state police agencies. So that's sort of a newer market for us, and then winning bigger deals like this, where we compete more often with companies like Motorola and Intergraph at the higher end of the market. The other advantage we have there is that we're the only company that does public safety software and courts and justice software. So I just talked about the big presence we have in the court space.
So we also have created value by integrating our public safety system with our courts and justice solutions, so that the data flows all the way from a 911 call, through an arrest, through a jailing, a jury selection, a trial, all the way through to probation. So you can have one solution from one vendor to manage all of that, as opposed to, you know, potentially whatever that is, seven or eight-
five or six, yeah
... different solutions from different vendors that are cobbled together or not integrated at all. So, we're the only company that kind of serves both sides, kind of surprisingly, but all of our competitors in public safety are different than our competitors in courts and justice.
Right. So moving on to everybody's favorite topic of AI. So you recently made three smaller deals that all kind of have an AI bent to them. This is actually really the first that I've heard you specifically talk about AI, was the press release with these deals. So maybe you can just help us understand, did you have products with AI embedded in them previously? And then now, what's kind of the go-forward strategy?
Yeah, some. And, you know, it wasn't something, you know, the hot topic. And to your kind of earlier point, government is typically not on the leading edge of adopting anything, and they typically kind of want to see how things work. They don't want to be the first to do anything, really understand it, and which is, you know, in a sense, kind of nice that not a lot sneaks up on us, and we have the luxury of being able to be thoughtful about how we integrate new technologies or things like AI into our products.
So we've had a you know, group looking at AI and sort of prioritizing, because we don't wanna have every business unit running off with AI projects and, maybe doing duplicate things or each setting their own priorities. So we're setting some kind of company-wide priorities around: Where can we get the biggest impact from either integrating AI into our products or into our internal operations? Things like our development organizations and our support organizations. But we think there's a lot of opportunities. Governments do a lot of things that are kind of repetitive and, you know, whether it's issuing licenses or permits or, you know, just a lot of repetitive processes-
Right
... that lend themselves well to that. Some of these, and we have done three acquisitions in the last year that all, not we didn't acquire them because they were AI-based, but they all had pretty significant AI components to them. One of them, a company called CSI, that's in the court space, and it's been a company we've partnered with forever, so this technology's been around. But it's primarily around document management and redaction, so taking sensitive information out of documents, court documents that are public. So doing that with machine learning and AI algorithms to manage that process, rather than a person going through and blacking out things. And so we think we can take that technology and use that much more broadly than just in the court space across Tyler products.
The second one was a company called ResourceX, which is, in our ERP space, and they're focused on, priority-based budgeting, which is sort of a different budget model, than what governments have often traditionally used. So again, taking a lot of data and helping governments figure out where they can get the best impact of making changes in their budgets. And then the third one is a company called ARInspect, that's in our licensing and permitting, sort of, general area. And it uses, machine learning and AI technology for field operations in the public sector. Think about things like inspecting bridges or, you know, infrastructure things. So helping, analyze where the biggest risks are, and where they should focus their attention.
All these are areas where we think we can take technology that's come through acquisitions and then more broadly embed it across other Tyler products. So, we're excited about being able to bring some of those things to our clients.
Got it. All right, we've got a couple minutes left here, so we'll ask a few financial-related questions. So you outlined a number of financial targets at the June Analyst Day, which was great to have all of that detail, including some 2025 objectives, which to note, there weren't just 2030, but there was also some 2025 numbers in there. And one of those was the 25% non-GAAP operating margin. You know, we know that near term, the cloud transition has impacted the margins. I've written about this recently, but maybe you can just help us understand how we get back to that 25% margin in 2025. It's not necessarily a-
Yeah
... linear progression-
Yeah, we-
over the next several quarters.
I think right now, our Non-GAAP Operating Margin for 23, the expectation was somewhere around 23%, maybe, in that ballpark. So a couple hundred basis points over the next couple of years, and more broadly, we talked about a 30%+ operating margin by 2030. So it's kind of an average of about 100 basis points a year, but we've also said it won't be linear, and that it's probably more loaded after 2025. Most of that margin improvement is coming from the gross margin line, and most of it from our cloud operations. So I talked about the optimization of our products to be more efficiently deployed in the cloud. There's a revenue uplift as this two-thirds of our customer base that's still on on-prem systems.
As they move to the cloud, we typically get about a 1.7x uplift in revenues. We have additional costs, so we have hosting costs, but we also. But the margins are higher as we move those customers to the cloud. We're getting more efficiency around our, our operations in AWS, so, our costs there are, are very much volume driven. So the more customers we have, the more capacity that we're, buying from them, the lower our unit costs go. So that's part of it as well. And then there's version consolidation. I talked about eliminating, the sprawl of where we, we often support multiple versions of multiple products, which is expensive from a, a development and a support standpoint.
As we move those customers to the cloud, our goal is to get everybody on the same version of the software and upgrade everyone at the same time, and so eliminate those costs associated with version sprawl. The last thing is around our data centers. We operate two internal data centers that we're migrating those customers out to AWS. Until we get the data, the first and then the second data center completely closed, we have a lot of fixed costs. So as we start to move customers out, we have duplicate costs. So we're paying AWS, but we're not able to eliminate a lot of the costs around the data center that we're operating.
So first of those closing around the middle of 2024, the second one around the end of 2025, and, and those will be margin accretive as well.
Yeah, I don't think you specifically cited which quarter in 2025 previously that the second data center would close.
Around the end of the year.
The end of the year.
By the end of the year.
Makes sense. Okay. We got about one minute left. Is there any questions from the audience? Otherwise, I can ask one more quick one. In terms of the balance sheet, you've been paying down the higher interest rate variable debt-
Mm.
which I believe there's only $200 million left. You've made, you know, as we know, a number of smaller acquisitions more recently in 2023 after the transformative NIC acquisition. Is that what we should kind of expect to continue in 2024, or is there gonna be any shift in the capital allocation priorities?
Yeah, we've always been a, you know, a strong cash flow company. We did. The NIC acquisition was $2.3 billion, and we had debt associated with that, that we've, we've de-levered pretty rapidly since then with our cash flow. So actually, we finished the year with only about $50 million of term debt left. So that'll be gone relatively early in the year. We also have a $600 million convert that's at 0.25% interest and due in 2026. So, that looks really good right now. So yeah, now that we've largely gotten through paying down the higher interest term debt, we have a lot of flexibility around our balance sheet.
We've always used the majority of our cash flow and occasionally debt to do acquisitions, most of those being kinda tuck-in acquisitions that broaden our capabilities, broaden our product offerings. I expect that'll still be the focus. We've had a pretty high bar for acquisitions because of the debt and because of the focus on integrating the acquisitions we already have. But I think as we move through next year and beyond or this year and beyond, then I think acquisitions still be the major priority with our cash flow.
Got it. Well, great.