Hello. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Altair Engineering, Inc. First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

[Operator Instructions]. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Dave Simon, Chief Administrative Officer. Please go ahead..

Good afternoon. Welcome and thank you for attending Altair's earnings conference call for the first quarter of 2022 ended March 31, 2022. I'm Dave Simon, Chief Administrative Officer of Altair. And with me on the call are Jim Scapa, Founder, Chairman and CEO; and Matt Brown, Chief Financial Officer.

After market closed today, we issued a press release with details regarding our first quarter performance and guidance for the second quarter and full-year 2022, 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 the IR section of our website following the conclusion of this 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 earlier today.

For a further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, 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.

Jim?.

Thank you, Dave, and welcome to everyone on the call. Today, I will discuss our results for the first quarter of 2022, the recent acquisitions and integrations of Powersim and World Programming, the release of our simulation 2022 software suite, some customer stories and our outlook for the remainder of the year.

Altair had a very strong first quarter 2022 with all of our key metrics coming in above guidance ranges. We began this year focused on our mission to deliver high-value products and expertise to help our customers increase efficiency and competitiveness by driving smarter decisions with computational science and artificial intelligence.

Despite macroeconomic challenges, including lockdowns in China, the war in Eastern Europe, supply chain disruptions, and inflation, our business momentum continues to be robust globally and across industry verticals.

Total billings for the first quarter 2022 were $171.3 million, an increase of 17.5% compared to Q1 2021, driven primarily by strong new and expansion software opportunities and high retention on our software renewal base.

We saw growth in all three geographic regions and particular strength in the technology and banking, financial service and insurance verticals. The growing success we experienced with our data analytics products in the second half of 2021, continued in the first quarter 2022, with notable wins in that space.

We are pleased to report Q1 results with total revenue of $159.8 million. Software product revenue for the quarter was $140.9 million versus $129.5 million in Q1 of 2021, reflecting year-on-year growth of 8.8% or 11.5% in constant currency.

Adjusted EBITDA for Q1 2022 was $46.6 million compared to $37 million in Q1 of 2021, an increase of nearly 26% from the first quarter of 2021. Software product revenue was 88.2% of total revenue for the first quarter compared to 86.3% in the prior year period.

Our recurring software license rate remains high at 93% for the first quarter of 2022 as compared to 92% for the full-year 2021.

While we saw strong software product revenue growth in the quarter, and over 80% of this incremental revenue converted to incremental EBITDA, the balance of the business saw an overall aggregate revenue decline of approximately $1.7 million as compared to the prior year period.

In March, Altair acquired Powersim, a market-leading provider of simulation and design tools for power electronics, including power supplies, motor drives, control systems, and microgrids. This acquisition expands Altair's electronic system design technology into the domain of power electronics.

Powersim has a leading solution proven to reduce development costs and time to market for thousands of customers around the globe, including major companies in the automotive, aerospace, consumer electronics, and industrial application sectors.

The addition of Powersim's technologies and experienced technical team with deep domain knowledge in power electronics rounds out Altair's offerings for electric motor design and many other applications.

We are rapidly integrating Powersim's software into Altair's electronic systems design suite for motor and controller design, device system, and circuit level simulations, embedded code generation, and combined cooling and thermal analysis.

Consistent with the tremendous value we offer customers under Altair units, Powersim is available under unit-based licensing subscriptions at no incremental cost. Last December, Altair acquired World Programming a UK-based technology company founded 20 years ago, specializing in data analytics software.

World Programming's flagship product allows programmers to develop and execute software solutions in multi-language coding environments, including Python or SQL and most notably, the SaaS language. Their technology and products are being integrated into Altair's data science solutions and made available under Altair units.

The SaaS coding language was developed and implemented in the early 1970s. Over the last 40 years, many large enterprises have used the SaaS language to develop data processing, statistical analysis, and data analysis programs, which run critical back-office functions often on mainframe computers.

Many organizations and individual programmers have been using it for decades and are comfortable and extremely proficient in it. While compilers and interpreters for most languages are widely available on many platforms, SaaS language compile and interpret was only available for many years from the SaaS Institute.

Today, we believe World Programming SaaS language compiling technology is extremely competitive from a performance and completeness perspective as over 500 customers, including many large-scale global enterprises employ it, and push its development. We see the acquisition of World Programming bringing a substantial opportunity for Altair.

However, the acquisition came with a significant challenge. An injunction existed against selling World Programming products in the United States, the largest market for data analytics globally.

In addition, many multinational customers expect to implement enterprise applications globally, including the United States, which made selecting World Programming solutions a challenge. On March 3, 2022, a federal judge in North Carolina ruled to lift the injunction and close the case against World Programming.

Altair is now free to sell World Programming products everywhere, including the United States. World Programming's technology exemplifies our dedication to an open architecture philosophy as the best way for people to harness innovation, improve products and get the most from their work.

We believe this acquisition will have an immediate profound impact on the way organizations think about their data science and coding operations.

In fact, customers and implementation partners are already telling us it will be a game changer, allowing them the power, flexibility and autonomy to determine their best approach and maximize every coding language they use and on which platforms on their own terms.

With World Programming, customers can address evolving organizational requirements and embrace modern computing, including cloud and open-source concepts, while simultaneously leveraging the decades of investment they put into the SaaS language. Altair's research and development investments remain a core source of our success.

Our recent release of Simulation 2022 includes next-generation connectivity, architecture, engineering and construction as well as circuit board and electronic design capabilities.

This latest release also includes a myriad of updates to Altair's traditional solutions with many new features and capabilities that broaden, strengthen, and further specialize Altair's comprehensive simulation toolkit.

Simulation 2022 includes a host of updates that bolster Altair's system modeling, finite element analysis, and manufacturing solutions, including an exciting new solver for binder jet sintering simulation for additive manufacturing.

Simulation 2022 also includes connectivity uptake features that help users simulate antennas with exceptional accuracy, get results and solve bigger problems faster and broaden users' tool set for the ADAS applications.

This release also includes many updates for architectural engineering, including support for several new international construction standards.

We have added more capabilities for circuit board and electronic design that enhance users' abilities to design and implement smart components, products and systems, including expanded features for design verification, signal integrity and printed circuit board modeling functionalities.

In our Simulation 2020 release, Altair introduced the Design Explorer module to provide users with seamless, easy-to-use, design ideation and exploration tools integrated into our finite element modeling environment.

Design Explorer workflows deliver interactive insights with multi-run simulation setup, execution, design of experiments, optimization and interpretation. It also leverages artificial intelligence as exploration generated data is trained using advanced machine learning techniques, providing AI predictive capabilities with near real-time performance.

With the release of Altair's Simulation 2022, the Design Explorer workflow is available in Inspire, allowing design engineers to parameterize geometry and leverage the extreme performance and efficiency of SimSolid.

In summary, Altair's Simulation 2022 represents an outstanding new level of functionality and performance to help our customers leverage the power of computational science and artificial intelligence. The significant increase in capabilities is directly related to several great first quarter wins for our simulation technologies.

In EMEA, we had two aerospace wins, representing 60% revenue increases through multidisciplinary tools, including SimSolid, 3D printing, electronic systems design and topology optimization. A major APAC automotive manufacturer committed to an expansion related to a multidisciplinary optimization and computational fluid dynamics.

And a building equipment supplier in EMEA selected Altair to be its solution across many disciplines, including electric motor development and structures. The convergence of simulation and AI continues to flourish.

We recently published a case study from BMW describing how it is emulating engineering expertise for automotive crashworthiness optimization through AI-enhanced surrogate modeling. The company is using Altair's machine-learning solutions to help target specific crash kinematics during structural optimization.

This new ML-powered workflow augments and extends BMW's existing engineering expertise, allowing it to more efficiently allocate computing and human resources to high-value simulation, analysis and validation efforts. Finally, our momentum in the banking and financial services sector continues.

We closed a significant data analytics deal to bring on one of the 10 largest banks in the U.S. as an Altair units customer and look forward to helping them fully leverage the power of data throughout their organization.

And we closed a five-year 8-figure licensing deal, our largest data analytics and AI deal ever with a global financial services company for applications across our product portfolio, including technology from our recent World Programming acquisition.

The opportunities in front of us are exciting, and we have many reasons to be optimistic amidst worldwide geopolitical and economic concerns. We are confident in our ability to do well despite the headwinds of economic uncertainty, especially given the exceptional value and combined strength of our culture, technology offerings, and business model.

We take deliberately our responsibilities as good global citizens. Our recently updated Sustainability Report includes discussion of our efforts around inclusion, community involvement, and academic programs, which empower students to become the forward thinkers and innovators, who will help build a more sustainable world.

Now I will turn the call over to Matt to provide more details on our financial performance and our guidance for the second quarter and full-year of 2022.

Matt?.

Thank you, Jim, and hello to everyone on the call. Thank you for joining us. In our first quarter 2022, we achieved another exciting milestone by recording the highest revenue and adjusted EBITDA in Altair's history.

The power of our software to enable better decision-making is resonating with our customers and translating to growth in both our top-line and profit, once again generating results above the high end of the range on every metric we guided to for the quarter. Total billings for the quarter were $171.3 million, an increase of 17.5% compared to Q1 2021.

This was driven by strong software billings in the quarter, supported by growth across all geographies. Our strength in software billings was partially offset by a decrease in services and other billings, which were down in the first quarter compared to prior year primarily as a result of declines in our CES business.

In total, the strength in billings resulted in software product and total revenue exceeding our expectations for the first quarter 2022. Software product revenue was $140.9 million or an increase of 8.8% compared to Q1 2021. Total revenue, which includes services and other revenue, was $159.8 million or an increase of 6.4% compared to Q1 2021.

Our recurring software license rate, which is the percentage of software product billings that are recurring, continues to be strong at approximately 93% for the quarter. As a reminder, a significant portion of our revenues are billed in currencies other than the U.S. dollar and are, therefore, impacted by changes in FX rates.

Relative to Q1 2021, our software product revenues and total revenues were unfavorably impacted by changes in FX rates of approximately $3.5 million and $4.0 million, respectively.

Therefore, on a constant currency basis, in the first quarter 2022, we saw year-over-year software product revenue growth and total revenue growth of approximately 11.5% and 9.0%, respectively.

Non-GAAP gross margin, which excludes stock-based compensation and restructuring expense, was 81.4% in the first quarter compared to 79.0% in the prior year, an increase of 240 basis points as our software revenue mix, which carries higher gross margins, increased as a percentage of total revenue.

In addition, our non-GAAP margins specific to software product revenue continued to improve as our support costs as a percentage of revenue trended down. Software revenue was 88.2% of total revenue in Q1 2022 compared to 86.3% in the prior year.

Over the long-term, we continue to expect a general mix shift towards software product revenue as growth there will continue to outpace services and other revenue.

Non-GAAP operating expenses, which excludes stock-based compensation, amortization of intangible assets and restructuring charges, were $84.9 million compared to $82.6 million in the year ago period.

Adjusted EBITDA in Q1 2022 was $46.6 million or 29.2% of total revenue compared to $37.0 million or 24.6% in the prior year quarter, an increase of 26.1%. This increase compared to prior year quarter as well as relative to our expectations was driven by the increase in revenue in the quarter, combined with our disciplined spending.

We continue to drive higher adjusted EBITDA as we see a greater percentage of our incremental revenue growth dropping to the bottom line. Turning to our balance sheet. We ended the first quarter with $405.6 million in cash and cash equivalents, a decrease of approximately $8.2 million from year-end.

The quarter-over-quarter decrease is primarily due to our payment of the litigation judgment against WPL of $65.9 million, which was a liability we assumed as part of our acquisition and paid in January. This payment was partially offset by strong cash flow from other operating activities.

Reflecting this payment, free cash flow during the quarter was $3.6 million. But excluding this one-time payment, our free cash flow for the quarter was $69.5 million compared to free cash flow of $33.5 million in Q1 2021. So we're very pleased with our cash flow generation in the first quarter. Turning to guidance for Q2 and full-year 2022.

We are expecting software product revenue for Q2 in the range of $111 million to $114 million or a year-over-year growth of 11.5% to 14.5%. And we're maintaining our full-year 2022 software product revenue guidance range of $496 million to $508 million or year-over-year growth of 9.3% to 12.0%.

We continue to expect services and other revenue to be down slightly in 2022 compared to 2021, consistent with our previous guidance. As a result, we expect total revenue for Q2 2022 in the range of $128 million to $131 million or year-over-year growth of 6.7% to 9.2%.

And we're maintaining our full-year 2022 total revenue guidance range of $568 million to $582 million or year-over-year growth of 6.7% to 9.4%. Our revenue guidance reflects currency headwinds relative to prior year as well as relative to the full-year guidance given last quarter. From a cost perspective, we continue to be disciplined in our approach.

We're investing in product development and sales and marketing, while reducing our spend in administrative departments, which is helping to drive increases in adjusted EBITDA.

For Q2 2022, we expect adjusted EBITDA in the range of $12 million to $14 million or 9.4% to 10.7% of total revenue compared to $9.5 million or 7.9% of total revenue in the year ago period.

And for full-year 2022, we are slightly raising our adjusted EBITDA guidance at the midpoint to a range of $98 million to $106 million or 17.3% to 18.2% of total revenue compared to $85.3 million or 16.0% of total revenue in 2021.

We are also raising our full-year 2022 free cash flow guidance to a range of $10 million to $17 million, which again includes the $65.9 million payment for the existing litigation judgment against WPL that we assumed as part of our acquisition and was paid in January.

As a reminder, our cash flow expectations are sensitive to billings and collection patterns, which fluctuate seasonally. In particular, our historical pattern has shown a free cash inflow in the first half of the year, primarily from collections on billings from Q4 and Q1 and a smaller free cash outflow in the second half of the year.

We're expecting that pattern to continue this year. We've provided detailed guidance tables in our earnings press release, including reconciliations to comparable GAAP amounts, which was issued after close of market today.

I'm excited about our record high results in the first quarter, which puts us in an excellent position to achieve our financial goals for the year, but I'm even more excited about the software and services we're offering into our customers, enabling them to make better products and make better decisions faster.

With that, we'd be happy to take your questions.

Operator?.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from Blair Abernethy with Rosenblatt. You may proceed with your question..

Hi, guys. It's Blair from Rosenblatt. So a great start to the year. Just wanted to talk to you a little bit -- ask you a little bit more about what you're seeing in Europe. Obviously, you've talked earlier in the quarter about your position in Russia.

But just wondering in terms of across the simulation, HPC and your customers in the banking side in data analytics, whether you're seeing any really change in the tenor or tone of projects or budgets that you're looking at this year?.

Forgive me, because there is a siren going by. So I'll just -- one second. I apologize..

Okay..

Were you specifically asking about Europe? Or was that globally? I'm sorry..

Yes, Europe. Europe, Jim..

Okay, Europe. Okay, that makes sense. So in general, we don't have a lot of exposure to Russia, first of all. I mean there's a little bit there. And obviously, we shut that down. We do have some things in Eastern Europe, and there is a kind of stagnation around that as well. So -- I mean, we're seeing some impact in Eastern Europe and Russia.

There's no doubt about it. It's not huge for us in the overall scheme of things. And -- but it hasn't -- from what we see, it hasn't really impacted the rest of Europe very much. That could change. And we have to be cautious about that, and we are. But right now, for the most part -- obviously, Russia and a bit in Eastern Europe.

But for the most part, I think we're feeling like things are moving relatively normally, emphasis on relatively..

On relative. Great. Just shifting gears to World Programming. Can you just talk about the integration side of things? What are your plans there on the product side? What should we be sort of watching for? And then on the go-to-market side, now that you have a free reign in the U.S.

market, how are you approaching that? Is it within your data and analytics teams? Or are they still standalone at World Programming's go-to-market? Just want to understand what's the status now..

I mean we have left the company in a standalone mode for now, but a lot of that is somewhat administrative. But we have a lot of things just going on with the finance team. Matt is in here smiling. But that should start to happen later this year.

As far as how we're operating and how we go-to-market, the teams are -- development teams are already pretty closely working together. The go-to-market teams are already working very closely together. We've organized so that those folks are part of our go-to-market teams on the data analytics side.

And then the products side, we're going to make those products available under our units model, which is powerful because, as you know, we're -- as fast as we can. We're moving customers into the units' model. And as they're in the units model, then those products become incremental solutions that are available to customers.

And customers, I think, are going to really value that, quite frankly. We are seeing a shift. I sort of alluded to it in my script that when there was the restriction in selling in the United States, it doesn't just impact the United States.

It impacts -- if you have a global enterprise, where they're headquartered in Europe, but they're going to have operations in the U.S. and the Americas. And so they might be more reluctant. In fact, they were more reluctant to do something, because they want to have a global solution.

So we are seeing a lot of opportunity, pipelines growing pretty fast, quite frankly. And whether or not it -- how fast these things close within 2022, not clear. But we are seeing a very, very significant increase to our pipeline. So we're pretty happy. We're very pleased about how things are going..

Okay. Great.

And just along the Altair units line, where are you at on your data and analytics customer base? How much of the weight -- how much of those customers are now on an Altair units model?.

I'm going to take a stab here. There's a lot of different kinds of customers that came out of data. There were literally thousands of customers. I'm not sure people realize the breadth of customer base that Datawatch had when we acquired them, they were a 30-year company. Several companies have been put together. So you have kind of a mix of accounts.

With the enterprise accounts, I'm going to say -- and this is truly a stab because I don't have a metric on it. I just looked at Matt, and he doesn't really know. So we're going to have to do better with that. But I think it's probably a third to half and -- but we are feeling a lot of momentum with that now.

And as you have more and interesting products in the portfolio, the units model becomes more and more interesting to customers, as you can imagine. So I think it's going to start getting easier and easier..

Thank you. And our next question comes from Mark Schappel with Loop Capital. You may proceed with your question..

Hi, thank you for taking my question and nice job on the quarter. Jim, a question for you around SimSolid. Not much discussion in your prepared remarks this quarter.

Just wondering if you could just give us an update on SimSolid?.

Yes. We continue to honestly just crush it with SimSolid, both on the development side -- we're adding more and more horsepower development team. We're investing in our winners basically and that as a winner. And so we're adding more and more capabilities to that product at a very, very rapid pace.

And we're engaged with customers, doing things that probably two years ago we thought might not be feasible to do. And then just in terms of impact to usage, it's by far the fastest growing product in the portfolio still..

Great. Thanks.

And then also, with respect to new customers, are you using SimSolid and also Inspire as kind of a starter or just kind of a lead product?.

SimSolid is -- is, in fact, a really great lead in, especially in the middle part of the market -- low to middle part of the market, because it's so easy to use, and where you might have an account that has Solid works or whatever. It's very -- it's so powerful and so fast, so easy to use.

And frankly, pretty reasonable depending on the package, the Altair units package that you do. So it is a great entree into that market. Similar for Inspire. And so, yes. But it's also in the very largest accounts, automotive, aerospace accounts. It has tremendous traction. People recognize more and more that this product is different.

And it gets overused. And I hate to say it, but it is really sort of game changer..

Great. Thank you. And then Matt, bringing you in here. With respect to guidance, it was a very strong quarter, especially on the software revenue side. And guidance is pretty much staying flat for the full-year.

Is that largely due to the currency headwinds that you addressed earlier?.

Yes, you've got it exactly right. So the amount that we overachieved on Q1 total revenue almost exactly is offset by currency headwinds that we're seeing just quarter-on-quarter relative to the guide that we gave for full-year just three months ago. So on a constant currency basis, you can read that us taking up guidance for the full-year for revenue.

But when we factor in reported currency, we're right back down to what we guided last quarter..

Thank you. Our next question comes from Dylan Becker with William Blair. You may proceed with your question..

Hey, guys. Appreciate taking the questions here. Nice job. And Jim, maybe -- I think you just touched on the data analytics side a second ago. But thinking about the applicability here of bringing simulation earlier throughout the design process.

Can you help us get a sense of maybe how the usage dynamics can come into play here, right? So more simulations requiring more data. You've got the units component too. But is there any other separate kind of unit dynamic on leveraging more data? Maybe it's a sophistication, complexity there. But to kind of capture both aspects of this tailwind..

Capturing especially the -- what that last word? I'm so sorry..

The tailwind around, again, more data being leveraged not only in simulation, but across enterprises..

Okay. So I had a little thing in my prepared remarks about the Design Explorer. And actually, that brings in SimSolid, because we've built that Design Explorer. It's kind of a tool that once you've got your model, now you can very, very quickly do set up well.

What's the impact of changing gauges? Or what's the impact of changing almost anything in your model. And you can set objective functions, mass or volumes or whatever you want, displacements. And originally, we put that into HyperMesh, which is primarily -- it's a module, but it's primarily finite element based solution.

And we add a whole element of AI there, by the way, because what we can do is we can take all the data from all these runs, and then we run it through a neural net. And now we also can predict changes using that. Now we put it into Inspire and we use SimSolid, which is blazing fast. It runs gazillions of simulations.

We can again do DOEs and use all these other methods. But one of the methods is to run it through -- run it through -- hang on a second, because my wife is calling me. She doesn't really know I have an earnings call today. So yes, we can run it through neural nets there as well.

And of course, SimSolid kind of allows us to run a huge number very, very fast simulations. And Inspire, what's cool about it, is you're able to parameterize the geometry as opposed to the mesh. So yes, we have that additional power as well. So I'm not sure I'm answering your question completely, but --.

Yes. That's super helpful. Helpful backdrop overall. Maybe switching to integration and your guys' kind of M&A strategy as well.

Maybe a reminder of kind of the existing cross-sell opportunity for WPL, because maybe some of these other guys as they're layering in incremental simulation functionality -- maybe who are some of the other simulation providers that they've maybe worked with in the past? And how that platform of your kind of portfolio of solutions maybe continues to resonate as maybe some of these customers as well are looking to standardize and leverage the units model given you can offer so much across your existing suite? Thanks..

I'm not sure I fully got that because we had fire engines go by again. I'm having a lot of interference challenges today. But I think what I heard is, do I see World Programming playing into a lot of the accounts that we have, cross-selling into a lot of these accounts. And see -- let me break it into two things.

On the banking and financial services market, which is a very big and important market for the analytics stuff, there's definitely big cross-sell opportunities there. There's almost -- basically, every customer you can think of is using the SaaS programming language and probably pretty extensively.

So there is a significant opportunity into all those accounts. There's also a pretty significant opportunity into our traditional base of manufacturing customers, because, believe it or not, many of those are using the SaaS language as well. And frankly speaking, early on in my career, I used SaaS to take test data and do statistical analysis on it.

I think -- so I think there is a lot of opportunity. The code, the compiler produces very, very efficient -- the algorithms are extremely efficient. So I think there's a -- there's used cases in the engineering world. There's obviously a lot of used cases in the business world and just the plain old data processing world..

Thank you. And that concludes our Q&A session. I would now like to turn the call back over to James Scapa for any closing remarks..

Just want to express appreciation for all the interest in Altair and the support for our company, to our investors and to the analysts as well. So -- and to my team, of course. Thank you..

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect..