Carlos A. Rodriguez - Automatic Data Processing, Inc.
Management
Sure. We disclose a lot of information, again as we've been trying to communicate with shareholders about some of the things we've been doing here over the last five or six years. We've disclosed, I think, some additional information about that. And I think starting off with the fact that we've increased our innovation spend from around $150 million to around $450 million, I think or somewhere thereabouts in that neighborhood, so it's a significant amount of increase in our R&D investment. A large part of that was in the next generation platforms that we just announced recently that we've been working on here in some cases for three to four years. But we've also made big investments in things like our data cloud and things like our mobile solutions and some of the other products and innovations that we actually already have out in the market and are helping us, I think, with our efforts in terms of helping our clients and also helping drive new business bookings and retention and so forth. So, that's a sense of what's happened with the innovation spend. On the maintenance spend, for the sake of I guess government work, it's about flat. So it's increased slightly. But again, in the world of some inflation, the fact that we've held that constant, we see that as a good news story. It was a conscious effort to really shift the mix, if you will, in the balance of our spending to more innovation and less maintenance. A lot of our maintenance spend is focused on platforms that serve tens of millions of employees that get paid, both on our tax engine and our payroll engine. And so as we develop these next generation technologies, when we retire those legacy platforms, which is a ways down the road, then obviously, we would expect actual decreases in maintenance spend. But for the last several years, this has really been a story of increasing the spend and making sure that that spend is focused on innovation while we build out the necessary platforms to move clients to and then reduce the spending on those legacy platforms. We have retired I think it's around 13 legacy platforms. So, it's the first time in a long time at ADP that we've actually retired things. So, it's not like we haven't made any progress, but those were relatively small dollar items in terms of the overall maintenance spend. The really big chunks of spend are on some of our large scaled legacy platforms that service, by the way, very well and are very efficient, very secure and very reliable. And we have no plans to get off of them in the next three to six months or any kind of timeframe like that. So this is a, as we always say, this is an evolutionary process, not an overnight change.