Howard Morof - CFO James Scapa - Founder, Chairman & CEO.

Bhavanmit Suri - William Blair & Company Sterling Auty - JPMorgan Chase & Co. Richard Valera - Needham & Company Alexander Frankiewicz - Berenberg Alexander Tout - Deutsche Bank.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Altair Third Quarter 2018 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Howard Morof, Chief Financial Officer. Sir, you may begin..

Thank you. Good afternoon, welcome, and thank you for attending Altair's earnings conference call for the third quarter 2018. I'm Howard Morof, Chief Financial Officer of Altair, and with me on the call is Jim Scapa, our Founder, Chairman and CEO.

After market close today, we issued a press release with details regarding our third quarter performance, which can be accessed on the Investor Relations section of our website at investor.altair.com. This call is being recorded, and a replay will be available on our IR website following the conclusion of the call.

During today's call, we will make statements related to our business that may be considered forward-looking under federal securities laws. These statements reflect our views only as of today and should not be considered representative of our views as of any subsequent date.

We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements or outlook. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. These risks are summarized in the press release that we issued today.

For a further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, including risks associated with our pending acquisition of Datawatch, please refer to those contained in our quarterly and annual reports filed with the SEC as well as other documents that we have filed or may file from time to time.

During the course of today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in our press release.

Finally, at times in our prepared comments or responses to your questions, we may offer metrics that are incremental to our usual presentation to provide greater insight into the dynamics of our business or our quarterly results. Please be advised that we may or may not continue to provide this additional detail in the future.

With that, let me turn the call over to Jim for his prepared remarks..

Monarch, Angoss and Panopticon. Monarch is a best-in-class technology for data preparation. Today, it is primarily used in finance, health care and retail to import, clean and organize unstructured data for use in reporting and analysis systems.

There is also an enormous need for this technology in engineering design and test and in dealing with sensor data coming in from live physical assets in the field. Panopticon provides real-time data streaming, leveraging Kafka, the fastest-growing open sourced data streaming solution in the market and making it accessible by nondevelopers.

Panopticon is most known for real-time data visualization and dashboarding and is primarily used today by traders and Capital Markets groups around the world. Its technology is unparalleled. Panopticon is also used today for IoT data streaming and visualization in other markets, such as energy and consumer products.

We see a significant revenue opportunity from integrating Panopticon's core functionality into our SmartWorks solutions to target IoT with greater focus. The future of product life cycle management is the idea of a unified digital twin, which integrates stimulation with data science to optimize product design and in-service operational performance.

Angoss brings proven commercial technology and expertise with data science and machine learning, which has broad applicability to science, engineering and business. Angoss is, in many ways, the most exciting Datawatch product and the primary opportunity we see with their solutions in our traditional markets.

Many of Altair's strategic customers have been asking for solutions, which integrate machine learning with CAE for the last couple of years. Now we feel confident in being able to address their ambitions. Just this morning in our regional manager call, everyone was excited about the opportunities for Angoss within CAE.

One example used case was to apply the technology for shape changes for external aerodynamics. Angoss will also be extremely relevant for developing autonomous driving platforms.

While we believe there is a large opportunity for Datawatch products in our installed base and this is our primary focus, we also see an opportunity to drive greater usage in their traditional markets. Datawatch's results as a stand-alone company were constrained by its lack of scale and limited international sales reach.

We believe putting its products into our HyperWorks platform and licensing model and leveraging our global go-to-market organization can drive significantly greater usage. This is a strategy we have successfully executed in each of our acquisitions over the years and we expect to drive similar positive results with Datawatch.

To be clear, we are not planning to make material incremental investments to drive growth in the financial services and Capital Markets industries. Simulation remains our central theme and is the fastest-growing segment in PLM.

We have committed to driving margin expansion as we progress toward our target of 20% adjusted EBITDA margins - 20%-plus adjusted EBITDA margins. Datawatch does not change the above thesis or the timing of our projected profitability improvement.

As noted the other day, we expect the transaction to be neutral to modestly accretive in our adjusted EBITDA for the very near term. From a cost standpoint, we've identified several million dollars of operational efficiencies we plan to put in place shortly after the transaction closes.

From a revenue perspective, our expectation for flat revenue growth in 2019 is solely the result of transitioning Datawatch to a ratable revenue recognition model and making its products available via the HyperWorks licensing model.

We expect to substantially complete this transition by the end of 2019 and that Datawatch's products will demonstrate strong growth starting in 2020. Turning back to our third quarter review. Our electromagnetic solutions continue to build a strong following.

In the third quarter, a major European telecom company signed one of our largest electromagnetic software licensing agreements to date.

A North American aerospace company issued a substantial expansion order centered around these products as part of their next generation UAV efforts, in addition to expanding their use of Altair's structural analysis software.

We had a similar story in the quarter with a European aerospace manufacturer who awarded us a nice business expansion related to both electromagnetics and structures. In September 2017, we acquired Runtime and made them part of our High-Performance Computing business.

With the integration of Runtime's team and products complete, the combined organization has worked hard to deliver to customers the strength of Runtime's technologies as part of Altair. I'm pleased to report then an important chip-making customer has agreed to nearly a 4x contract expansion for solutions related to that acquisition.

We continue to see a lot of opportunity for these products to expand their footprint in the EDA, HPC and cloud markets and also see opportunities to disrupt the FinTech HPC world in the future. A relatively new initiative for us announced at the end of July is our global start-up program for new tech and emerging markets entrepreneurs.

This program is a way for us to support entrepreneurial companies who have the opportunity to become long-term meaningful revenue customers for Altair. We see ourselves helping to grow the global economy by getting behind these exciting inventors and entrepreneurs.

Participating companies get preferential pricing and no-cost expert consulting from Altair to quickly ramp up. The program has gotten excellent traction.

Its web page has already attracted several thousand visitors and over 150 applicants, with multiple business accelerator partnerships in place and over a dozen new start-up customers across the diverse range of sectors, including unmanned vehicles, electric machinery, recreational boating, antennas, e-mobility and orthotics.

In summary, we had a strong third quarter followed by the game-changing acquisition of SIMSOLID and the agreement to acquire Datawatch. We remain very optimistic about our outlook and truly look forward to bringing exciting new products to our customers.

Now I will turn the call over to Howard for details on our financial performance during the third quarter as well as an update on our financial guidance.

Howard?.

software product revenue to be between $75 million and $76 million, representing growth of 10% to 12% from the fourth quarter of 2017, which otherwise would be 12% to 13%, taking into consideration currency impacts; total revenue to be between $98 million and $99 million, representing growth of 9% to 10% from the fourth quarter of 2017; adjusted EBITDA of between $11.5 million and $12.5 million; GAAP net income to be between $5.5 million and $6.5 million; and non-GAAP net income to be between $7.9 million and $8.9 million.

This guidance excludes estimated stock-based compensation expense of approximately $600,000 and that we expect fully diluted share count to be approximately 77 million shares. Before I finish, I wanted to comment specifically on our initial thoughts about the Datawatch transaction from a financial perspective.

We expect that we'll be able to realize a significant level of operational efficiencies on top of planned synergies as the business is integrated into our operations.

This combination, coupled with the expected continuing organic growth in the Datawatch business, particularly after accelerating the conversion to recurring revenues, is supportive of our commitment to achieve our long-term operating margin targets within our expected timeline.

As Jim mentioned earlier, across our substantial customer base around the globe, we believe there are significant cross-sell opportunities for us to capitalize upon with the impressive elements of Datawatch's technology.

Just as we have integrated a wide array of prior acquisitions over our history, we have the depth of experience in revenue model conversions to our units-based licensing model and a solid track record of diligently realizing value from these types of investments.

To summarize, we continue to be pleased with the performance of the business for the third quarter and the first nine months of 2018. We are executing well on our strategic priorities and generating an attractive combination of growth and increasing profitability and cash flow.

With that, operator, can we now open up the call to questions?.

[Operator Instructions]. And our first question comes from Bhavan Suri from William Blair..

I just had a couple of questions.

I guess, first, drilling into solidThinking, I'd like to sort of get a little color on how the business is going and then, b, sort of as you've transitioned to the unit-based model for that sort of products, so what the uptick has been sort of viral-based crossover we see happening with sort of the HyperWorks business.

Have you started to see that inflection yet or is it too early?.

I think, it's too early, to be honest with you. We're really just getting out to all the resellers. They have to be acclimated to the model. They seem to be very positive though. I met with founder of one of the largest resellers in the U.S. personally 1.5 months ago.

And he was pretty excited actually and saw really big opportunities, particularly excited because solidThinking now includes the whole platform, the Inspire platform, which has greatly expanded with a lot of simulation capabilities for manufacturing and industrial design as well, but we also included a new solution, which we call SIMSOLID.

And SIMSOLID is a higher end. It's part of our HyperWorks solution that's higher-end solution for simulation analysts actually. And what we did is, we integrated our structures, electromagnetics and fluid solution all in one environment where you can run multidisciplinary.

And in the mid-market where these guys sell, there's two basic competitors, if you will. It's the CAD integrated simulation, which inspired, honestly does - is at a much higher level, but they also run into other solutions that are pure simulation solutions that in certain instances, their products can't win.

So the SIMSOLID product is just extremely strong in those environments. So he was very excited..

Great, great. That's helpful. And then just sort of growth rate of that business. But then, I guess, as a follow-up, I'd love to know the growth rate of the solidThinking business or sort of where was it vis-à-vis expectations, but I also want to follow up with just a little more philosophical question.

As you think about the investment that you make either acquisition or R&D, obviously, the Datawatch acquisition being in mind, how do you sort of split that between analytics to Datawatch's again some data prep, analytics, P&L part separated [indiscernible] so you've got carriage, you've got a bunch of other stuff there versus the solver investment where you can sort of directly cross-sell into a base that sort of is looking for more solutions, whether it's electromagnetics, computational hemodynamics, et cetera.

How do you balance that sort of [indiscernible] new areas that we can do versus sort of core stuff for existing sort of engineering customer base and I'd love to sort of understand by that philosophy..

Sure. So specifically around the Datawatch solutions, most of my business is with enterprise-level customers. The SIMSOLID product line is trying to address the mid-market more and is new for us and we're excited about what we're doing there, but it's not where the vast majority of my business is. Every customer I visit, I won't name names, okay.

But every automotive company when I visit with their senior management, aerospace companies, the first question they're asking me is, what are you doing with machine learning, what are you doing with data science and how are we going to integrate this into our solutions in CAE.

So I think, with my enterprise customers, the ability to really deliver knowledge first of all, who has lot of expertise coming in and integrated solutions is going to be something very attractive to them. I think, it's - you're going to see a lot of uptake actually..

And our next question comes from Sterling Auty with JPMorgan..

I wanted to just dive into the auto sector a little bit given the comments in the press release and a lot of investors asking given the kind of the global environment, what's happening there.

Jim, what are you seeing in terms of their willingness or eagerness to take on additional solutions either more products or more products for more users in the environment that we're in currently?.

So we don't sell cars, right. We sell technology to develop cars. And actually, in this environment, first of all, the whole market is expanding because you have a ton of new companies. There is like 12 EV companies along the West Coast right now that didn't exist 3 years ago.

So automotive - if I look at my different sectors, automotive is growing as fast and maybe even faster than all the other sectors, which are all growing pretty nicely. So automotive is still going very, very well, is still hot actually in many ways, and I think there is a hunger for all these guys to really be extremely competitive in this market.

The cost for what we do and the cost for engineering is a very small percentage of their overall spend, and I think they're all seeing it is a very, very worthwhile spend right now..

Okay. And then one follow-up, Howard. I want to make sure I understood the revenue recognition in the bundled contract. Am I to understand it was a bundled contract that you just didn't hit the services delivery milestone so that you could recognize the software component? Or just help me understand that a little bit better..

So, yes, Sterling, that's essentially is in a nutshell, which is under our revenue recognition criteria. Until we deliver - start to deliver all of the service elements, the revenue is deferred, including the software side.

So simplistically, their software and training delivered it, we don't recognize the software portion until we start to commence on the training side. So it's all about timing, and the $1.8 million will get picked up as we look forward into Q4 and beyond..

And our next question comes from Rich Valera with Needham & Company..

Jim, I just wanted to ask a broader version of Sterling's question.

Have you seen any changes in the receptiveness of customers to purchase solutions given the current macro outlook, putting aside auto? Just have you seen any kind of hesitation or pulling back from your customers, given sort of the macro choppiness we've seen here?.

So I'm like a fairly cautious CEO, I would say. I've been around a long time and I've seen a lot of business climates. So far, things continue to be pretty strong, to be perfectly honest with you. So I also certainly worry about where my things go with all the geopolitical and macro issues, but, honestly, up until now, I haven't really detected that..

Got it. And then just a follow-up on your comments regarding Datawatch and specifically, Monarch, it sounded like maybe you were saying that you thought that you could sell data prep to your existing CAE customers, to your kind of core customers at some point.

Is that what you're thinking? Is there a market to sell their data prep tools into the CAE base, do you think?.

So what I think about data prep is, data prep is sort of an essential element of data science. And what - if you're familiar with that market, I won't mention some of the players there. Data prep and data science are kind of coming together because it's very natural you can't do data science unless you're able to do the data prep piece very well.

And so for that reason, I think, there is going to be a pretty strong need for both.

Does that make sense?.

Yes. I guess, I'm just trying to figure out, has it been - it sounds like, in the past, it hasn't been sold into the base, but you're thinking as you kind of have this merging of data prep and data science, that there will be a market forward essentially with those customers.

Is that fair?.

I think, that is true. I think, you may see some of the tools and capabilities delivered a little bit differently. For example, you may start to see more data prep capabilities integrated in the data science platform.

But because of our units model, we make it easy for a customer who is doing data science with Angoss to be able to immediately use their units and use Monarch or Swarm to do their data prep..

Got it. And one follow-up, last one for Howard. Is it - can you quickly tell us what the adjustment was that you made to the prior year deferred revenue for the acquisition? I think, it was the Runtime acquisition..

The adjustment?.

Yes..

For the acquired deferred revenue, yes, that was about $2.1 million..

[Operator Instructions]. And our next question comes from Alex Frankiewicz with Berenberg..

I just had a couple around the Datawatch acquisition.

The first one is, given that Datawatch core customers are in financial services mainly and other industries outside of simulation, do you think you could see some churn in base given that you'll no longer be making investments there?.

I didn't say we're not going to make investments there. What I said is, we're not going to make, if you will, significant incremental investments there. So I think that businesses still important and we will certainly have a team that focuses on those customer accounts.

And in particular, I think, we're going to focus on the more substantive accounts, trying to do what Altair tends to do, which is deliver more love and support to the more meaningful accounts that are in that market. It's sort of that 80-20 rule.

And we have a little bit of a luxury to grow those accounts, make them more substantial and convert them to subscription model over time..

Okay. That's helpful.

And then also just given that Datawatch typically sold into different divisions than your traditional products within Datawatch's stand-alone products, how are you thinking about penetrating those accounts given that your typical sales reps will talk to the R&D and engineering departments?.

So we think there's a play on the R&D and engineering and test side, first of all, which obviously, we know those customers and we're going to explore that and we'll do an overlay team that basically calls into the existing customers and identify some of these groups in the existing customers that basically have a need for these tools and can run them under a licensing model..

And our next question comes from Alex Tout with Deutsche Bank..

I think, I missed the start of the call where you explained this, but, I think, in the press release you said that the shortfall relative to the guidance was due to FX and then I heard another question referring to a delayed services contract something like that, that might have been driving it.

So just to be fully clear, how much of the shortfall relative to your expectations was driven by FX? And how much by that services contract and any other factors that might have been driving that?.

FX was $900,000 and then the timing on revenue recognition, that attributed another $1.8 million. So that's it. No other factors there. Obviously, from just an overall software momentum quarter, just a really nice quarter..

I'm sorry, was that just a specific 606 recognition issue? Or it was a genuine projects overrun? And are these kinds of projects significant in the overall revenue?.

No, it's not a 606 issue because we still operate under 605. And it had to do with contracts where you have multiple elements and our revenue recognition criteria needing all elements within a customer arrangement to begin - to have started to deliver services or such an order to trigger revenue recognition..

Okay, I'm sorry, and then just finally, the slight trim to full year guidance, what is that? Is that FX or the contracts? And does it kind of imply that you don't expect to fully complete that contract by the end of the year? Just the explanation there..

So we had FX absolutely as a contributor. And on the $1.8 million, that will be recognized essentially ratably over time under 605, so over the remaining duration of that arrangement. So you are correct..

And I am not showing any further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. James Scapa, founder and CEO, for any closing remarks..

Okay. Thank you. I just want to thank everybody for joining the call for your interest in Altair, and I look forward to answering any questions that the rest of you might have. Thank you..

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude today's program and you may all disconnect. Everyone, have a wonderful day..