Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Agilysys Fiscal 2021 Third Quarter Conference Call. As a reminder, today's conference maybe recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jessica Hennessy, Senior Manager of Corporate Strategy and Investor Relations at Agilysys. You may begin.

Thank you, Liz, and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining the Agilysys fiscal 2021 third quarter conference call. We will get started in just a minute with management's comments, but before doing so, let me read the safe harbor language. Some statements made on today's call will be predictive and are intended to be made as forward-looking within the safe harbor protections of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding our financial guidance. Although the Company believes that its forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to differ materially. Important factors that could cause actual results to vary materially from these in the forward-looking statements could include the continued effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business and the hospitality industry, the success of any measures we have taken or may take in the future in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The timing of the reopening phase of the hospitality industry and the risks set forth in the Company's reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. I'd now like to turn the call over to Mr. Ramesh Srinivasan, President and CEO of Agilysys. Ramesh, please go ahead.

Thank you, Jessica. Good afternoon and good evening, everyone. Welcome to our fiscal 2021 third quarter earnings call. Joining Jessica and me on the call today is Dave Wood, our CFO. For the third consecutive quarter, I am participating in this call from our Las Vegas office, while Dave is in our Atlanta office and Jessica is in Dallas. We hope to get back to our pre-pandemic routine and conduct the next Q4 and fiscal year-end earnings call sometime around mid-May with all of us in one place in our favorite Atlanta conference room. We hope all of you and your families and colleagues are doing well during these challenging times. Knock on wood, we've managed to work through the past 10 months with a steadfast focus on the health and safety of all our employees and everyone we serve with good results. The work-from-home arrangements have worked out well with no compromise on our pace of product innovation and level of customer service. During this time, many of our employees have continued to travel to customer sites when customers have requested such help. For many different reasons, we are eagerly looking forward to a return to near normalcy, hopefully no later than the second-half of this calendar year. The global hospitality industry continued to face difficult headwinds due to the pandemic as calendar 2020 wound down to an end, impacting our sales and revenue levels. Fiscal 2021 Q3 revenue grew about 7% sequentially over Q2 to $36.7 million, a 13, that is 1-3, a 13% year-over-year decline compared to Q3 of fiscal year 2020. Product and services revenue grew 16 and 13, that is 1-6 and 1-3. Product and services revenue grew 16% and 13%, respectively, sequentially compared to Q2, but remained at 63% and 70% year-over-year of the…

Thank you, Ramesh. To echo Ramesh's comments, despite these challenging times, we remain confident in the strength of our business and specifically our team members who are continuing to push the company and innovation levels forward despite unusual or remote working conditions. With respect to our financial results, beginning with our income statement. Third quarter fiscal 2021 revenue was $36.7 million, a 6.7% sequential increase over the fiscal second quarter of 2021 with all three product lines increasing sequentially over the prior quarter. The third fiscal quarter represented a sequential 13.3% increase in professional services, a 15.9% increase in product revenue, as well as a 2.4% increase in recurring revenue over fiscal second quarter of 2021. As expected, third quarter fiscal 2021 revenue was a 12.7% year-over-year decrease from total net revenue of $42 million in the comparable prior year period due to the current economic environment resulting in lower product and professional services sales. Recurring revenue continues to increase on the back of our subscription growth and represented an increase of 9% over the prior year. Total recurring revenue represented 62.3% of total net revenue for the fiscal third quarter, compared to 49.9% of total net revenues in the comparable prior year period. Recurring revenue of $22.8 million is at record levels and $1.9 million higher than the prior year. We are also very pleased with our subscription revenue growth, which grew year-over-year 18.1% during the third quarter of fiscal 2021 to a record $9.3 million. Subscription revenue comprised about 41% of total recurring revenue compared to 37.7% of total recurring revenue in the third quarter of fiscal 2020. Add-on software modules that build out our product ecosystem beyond the core point-of-sale, property management and inventory procurement offerings are adding scale quickly with roughly 23% of sales deals and…

Thank you, Dave. Being an entirely hospitality industry-focused software solutions company, the last few quarters have tested us in every way possible, and we have good reasons to believe that has only made us stronger and better. While presenting short-term challenges and temporarily disrupting our growth, the recent circumstances have made our organizational culture and mindset change process happened quicker. We have navigated through this pandemic without reducing our capability in any aspect of our business, which will be crucial for future medium-term and long-term growth. It is also likely that we gain significantly with respect to our various competitive advantage aspects. As Dave mentioned, one of the highlights of our last three quarters has been the discipline across all departments and strong results shown in areas like cash collections. That cash collection discipline has cost us some loss recurring revenue and increased customer churn, but has improved the quality of our business content. That kind of extra discipline and good new muscle memory in how we do things, how we stay on the right track and always find the right balance between growth and profitability will be valuable for us in the future. We've also successfully turned the corner with respect to profitability, and in these toughest of times have demonstrated the future earnings potential of this business. You should continue to expect us to maintain a 15, 1-5, a 15% plus adjusted EBITDA to revenue ratio during the next few quarters, and then improve on it in the future when the revenue growth phase returns. The second half of fiscal 2022 should be the time when the business growth starts aligning well. That should be about the time when virtually all of our heavy lifting of the product development efforts will be completed. We will have a confident and experienced team ready to take us to the next level. We will have the cost room to increase our sales and marketing spend and the hospitality industry headwinds will be turning to be tailwinds with a ballooning pent-up demand for better, more integrated and comprehensive software solutions. The post-pandemic stage in this industry is most likely going to require significant energy and investments devoted to guest-centric solutions and we have prepared ourselves well for that stage. We have kept our feet firmly on the product innovation and customer service gas pedals in the meanwhile, while also vastly improving all our business and organizational culture fundamentals. With that, Liz, please open up the call for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Matt VanVliet with BTIG. Your line is now open.

Yes. Hi. Thanks for taking my question and good afternoon. I guess, Ramesh, first wanted to dig in a little bit on some of the comments you made around existing customers seeing a lot more cross-sell, up-sell opportunities, is that where you're focusing the majority of your attention now as bigger projects are either being put on hold or just kind of on the back burner? And really, kind of how are you directing the sales team and the overall go-to-market motion in terms of kind of allocation of resources over the next several months?

Yes. Hi, Matt. Yes, thank you for the question. I wouldn't say we’re only focusing on existing customers, Matt. But among the four major categories of sales areas that we focus on, new logo, new site, meaning major customers who now use us for a new site, new products, meaning products we sell to current sites and, of course, other existing customers, sales categories like services and others we do. We are focusing on all of them, but we are having less success with new sites. So some of our major customers who typically, over the past couple of years, have taken us from one new site to another where we have gained hundreds of new sites in the previous couple of fiscal years, that has definitely slowed down because those major customers are struggling in the pandemic now. So this is not the time for them to take us to new sites. So that part has slowed down. But the other three areas we have kept our focus on them. New logos, like we told you, there our eight new customers who signed up this quarter and that is because of very focused sales effort. And the good news about all those eight customers is all of them are SaaS customers. All of them chose our SaaS products and some of them are very – at least a couple of them are very big deals, involving POS, PMS and all our additional products. So we are keeping the focus on new customers as well and we also are keeping focus on new products because we just have so many new products to sell. That is also a part of our sales success that has done reasonably well. And existing customers, of course, continue to do business with us in terms of buying extra licenses or involving us in a services-related project and things like that. So of the four categories, Matt, the only thing that has slowed down is new sites. There's no lack of focus in new logo, selling new products to current sites or other miscellaneous sales that existing customers tend to do with us.

Okay. That's very helpful. And then you also mentioned a few, I guess, projects that you've gotten contracts signed. And it's just kind of TBD on when the project actually starts. Could you give us a little more detail around maybe the size and scope of some of these, maybe what the revenue impact either was or could be once those projects get started? And then any clarity or any information you have around projected timeline around those insomuch as you have some?

Yes. So typically, those kinds of decisions, where customers initially sign up for and then things go a bit south for them, again, they are forced to close down for a while or their business goes down, I would say affects us by a few million dollars every quarter now, right? By a couple of million dollars kind of thing, that kind of revenue impact we do feel right each quarter. In terms of timeline, when that will pick up again is difficult because with different customers, the part of it did pick up last quarter. So some of what was held up before between the April and say September timeframe, some of those customers did pick it up in the October through December, but still it is slow. It is still – we have more in the backlog, which we should be able to ship to customers and get services projects going, but it is delayed. Because customers, they think one thing when they are signing the deal, they are really intrigued by the products. They want to get going, but then things don't go well for them so they slow it down. That affects us I would say by a couple of million, a few million every quarter. And once that starts picking up, I think is going to be a flood, right? It really is going to be a flood. It is going to be like the dam breaks out and then the pent-up demand really kicks in. The pent-up demand will be not only with respect to the backlog, but it will be respect to – with respect to the rest of the business as well. So that backlog of customers not picking up projects that they have signed up for is a small one. The bigger part of it is sales demos that go very successfully and customers and the middle management, senior management are kind of very promising with their feedback, but then it gets stuck up in the approval queue. Because now approvals have to go to a very high level and it gets delayed. That is the bigger portion of the business pick up that we are eagerly looking forward to. And my guess, Matt is, I think we are a couple of quarters away before it really starts picking up. And when it picks up, I think it's going to pick up big time.

All right. Great. Thank you.

Our next question comes from George Sutton with Craig-Hallum.

Thank you. I think my first question is a little bit of a follow-up on what you were just saying, Ramesh, and that is, you talk about a major growth phase ahead and a ballooning pent-up demand. Is there any way to quantify that? Is there any way to talk about when in the reopening phase we would really start to see that impact?

Yes. So tough to quantify that George. It's not easy to quantify that because a lot of demos go very well, and some of those deals are pretty big-sized deals. And then we hear it's going to happen this week, it’s going to happen next week and it keeps pushing forward. So the one answer I will struggle to help you with is how do you quantify that? We don't know how to quantify that. It's going to be a major growth when it happens, mainly because of the feedback we are seeing with that new products. Many customers are surprised how well our products can help them, so tough to quantify that. Now in terms of when the growth phase will come, my own guess is that the growth phase will start happening a little bit before the reopening phase. So I don't think it will wait for the reopening phase and then happen a few months later. I have a feeling it'll happen a few weeks or a couple of months before that. That is because once we are clear, the light is at the end of the tunnel, and we know when that light we are going to reach, customers will start making these decisions. They will start confirming these because a lot of this technology they need for the reopening and then growth phase thereafter. So two answers to your question, George, quantifying that is difficult. Don't know how to put a number on it. But when the growth phase will start, it will happen a little bit before the reopening phase, not after.

Gotcha. You mentioned you were moving away from a large reseller relationship. I'm wondering if you could talk about the logic of that, a and b, the financial impact, both short and long-term that you're expecting from that move?

Yes. So what happened, I think it was sometime in the calendar 2014 timeframe, George, when we sort of walked away from the EMEA market and we handed it over to a reseller and a pretty good reseller. So they were – they did do an effective job of reselling our InfoGenesis POS product, especially in the stadium and entertainment market in the UK and other markets. Same thing in Australia. In EMEA, we had a presence and walked away and handed it over to the reseller. While in Australia, we never had a presence. We just handed it over to the reseller directly somewhere around that timeframe. This is well before my time. And then the first – according to the contract and agreements we had with them, the first opportunity we really had to sort of end that reseller agreement was the end of calendar 2020. And therefore, we decided to end it then. Now we reestablished a presence in EMEA in about the 2016 timeframe, and we have grown our team since then in the last few years. But there are certain segments of the market that reseller has been selling. Now by definition, based on how the agreement has been, the reseller agreement has resulted in very low pricing for us, extremely low pricing for us. And that is just how the agreement was done, right? Our margins were very low on that. So number one, we have presence. Number two, we have hired in Australia now, and we've already talked to many of those customers who were dealing with the reseller, but will now be dealing with us. So what you should expect in the short-term is a slight revenue bump because instead of some of the customers paying to them and we getting a portion of it, the customers will be paying to us directly. While on the other hand, some of the customers might move away from us because they don't have a relationship with us. They don't know about our recent improvements. So there will be some customer loss as well. But we believe that the gain we get from revenue by the customer paying us directly will be slightly higher than the loss of certain customers. And especially in Australia, our revenue has been very low. Now we have the products, we think there will be a short-term bump during this calendar year, but thereafter, it will contribute to very good revenue growth because we'll establish direct relationship with the customers and now they will come to know about all the other additional modules we have. So slight short-term bump this calendar year in revenue and significant revenue growth in calendar 2022.

All make sense. Thank you very much.

Thanks, George.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets.

Yes. Thank you. And good to speak with you guys this afternoon. So it’s not surprising at all that you guys are guiding for a flat revenue Q-over-Q, given the relatively poor travel data that's out there on a near-term basis. But could you give us a sense as far as how you would expect that to parse out between recurring and non-recurring elements?

Dave, do you want to take that or should I?

Yes, I can take that. Hey, Nehal. We expect recurring to continue to tick up slightly. We think it will be close to the increases that you're used to seeing. Subscription will probably still drag slightly less than the 20% because of the credits and some of the other one-time things associated with churn. But recurring revenue will continue to increase, and where you'll see a little bit of compression is on the product and services line.

Okay.

But all three product lines will stay fairly similar to what they are today with a little increase in the recurring line.

Okay. Great. And then on the December quarter results, the subscription revenue; that was up just $0.2 million Q-over-Q. And aside from the June Q numbers, that's, I think, one of the smaller sequential increases that you've seen on the subscription revenue. Was there any headwinds, or is there just seasonality in the December quarter, or was it just simply a very slow rate of new and upsell of the subscriptions?

Yes. It is still good growth year-over-year, Nehal. It's about 18% year-over-year growth, under the current circumstances, that is still good growth. Some one-time credits did temporarily affect that number, right? There is still considerable pressure from customers for one-time recurring revenue relief and credits, and much of it involves subscription payment as well. I mean, our recurring revenue is not transaction-based, Nehal, like you know, but still, we have to help customers out because this reopening is getting delayed. That is one reason. The one-time credits given to customers did affect that number to a certain extent. And also, lower sales this year and delays in implementation of what has been sold are also contributing factors, right? But with respect to this, like with all other aspects of our business, we are setting ourselves up for much better growth in the post-pandemic future, a lot more products that are subscription-based now, a lot more products. Compared to two years ago, we have about 10 to 15 more products that are all subscription-based. And also some of the modernization efforts we are finishing of our core products is going to make many customers move from on-prem installs to subscription-based installs in the cloud and all that. All that is going to happen. So I think the subscription revenue growth number is going to be a bit lower for the next couple of quarters, and then it is going to resume to be in the mid-20s like we were before and then go higher from there. So this quarter was affected by some one-time credits and the fact that our sales has been low for the last couple of quarters to kind of caught up with that.

Right. Okay. When I look at the historical subscription number, I see in 2017, you did have a $0.1 million Q-over-Q decline. December 2018, you had a $0.1 million Q-over-Q decline. December 2019, however, it was a $0.6 million Q-over-Q increase. So that's why I asked. I mean, is there some seasonality here that goes on in the December quarter with respect to subscription?

There's no seasonality, Nehal, in this. Other than for cash collections, certain quarters are better than the others. There is really no seasonality in our business at all.

Okay. And then you did mention that there are pockets of strength. Could you detail what those pockets are?

There are many – like I think we've said in the last couple of quarters as well, Nehal. There are many of the resorts and many of the casinos that we cater to that are doing well, especially the tribal gaming casinos. And a lot of the award, I would call drivable resorts, right, where people can drive to. Many of the golf resorts are all doing quite well, and they are continuing to make technology decisions. In fact, there are two major resorts in the East Coast that within the next few weeks should be live with virtually all of our products. POS, PMS and all the other additional modules, they should be live. And both of them are regional resorts where people can easily drive to. They're all continuing to do well. And many tribal gaming casinos, regional casinos are continuing to do well. So those pockets of strengths are there in the business. However, like managed food service providers are really struggling, right, because the employee cafeterias and all that have not yet opened up. And we all know the story about cruise ships still. So some aspects of the business are struggling, but many aspects of the business are showing pockets of strength, which is what has sort of kept us going during these last three quarters.

Okay. Great. I'll get back into the queue.

Thank you, Nehal.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Allen Klee with Maxim Group.

Good afternoon. Last quarter, you mentioned that your new demand software product could add a few percentage points to revenue in calendar 2021. Could you just give us an update on how that's been doing?

Hey, Allen. Yes, so last quarter, we said that the OnDemand product could add 3% to 5% of the subscription revenue growth. So the product is going well. We're still seeing very low cancellations through the free trial period. And as of right now, of the 200 properties and roughly 500 profit centers we mentioned on the call last quarter, roughly half, slightly less than half are currently live and using the product. So still significant ramp ahead for that one.

That's great. And then you also talked about your full-service PMS offering that you're working on that. And I guess by the end of the year that that should be in pretty good shape. Could you tell – in the past, you used to talk about that you had some beta trials from some large hotels. Is there anything that you can mention about that of anyone who's kind of working with it now that could potentially be a large opportunity? Thank you.

Yes. So when I listed a list of about seven or eight particular wins, you would have noticed a couple of them. At least three of them or so involve PMS as well. The Stay PMS product now is absolutely competitive. It is on par with any other PMS product there. And technology-wise and because it's a truly modern product, it's ahead of the other competing PMS products as well. So when you think about the number of demos we do and our sales pipeline, PMS is far above what it used to be, say, 12 months, 24 months ago. There's just a lot more major PMS opportunities that we are currently involved in. Unfortunately, our PMS resurgence coincided with the pandemic. So even though in terms of number of demos and in terms of how customers view it, we have come a long way. We are a lot more competitive in PMS. Unfortunately, those decisions have got slowed down a bit. But we have definitely broken through. Like Crystal Springs Resort that I talked about during the script is a major PMS win for us. And before that, I also mentioned a couple of other stay wins that we had. That's one aspect of it. The other aspect also, Allen, is the fact that the add-on modules around PMS have also seen a lot of success during the last few months. Mobile check-in/checkout and rGuest Service and all those products have done pretty well for us sales wise. In fact, that's what has really kept our flag flying even during these tough times. And then some of the PMS supporting products like, spa, the new golf module and the new sales and catering modules, and then the Agilysys Engage product have all seen success during the past few weeks. So PMS and related products wise, Allen, we are in far better, exponentially higher position than we were 12 to 24 months ago. But it has not yet fully resulted in the kind of improved numbers you would like to see because of the sales decision slowing down because of the pandemic.

Great. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Allen. Appreciate it.

We have a follow-up question from the line of Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets.

Yes. Thanks. So you guys talked about how bookings have been at two thirds of prior fiscal year levels, and yet when we look at end markets, I think they're down 50%. So that looks very good. So my question is, is that, is this linearly translatable to what bookings level will resume to when the industry returns? I.e., are we going to be – if provided the industry returns to prior pre-pandemic levels, does this reflect that Agilysys business is actually 30% better than it was on a normalized basis? Or does this reflect more of the mission-critical nature of Agilysys solutions and that there's basically inelastic demand for the Agilysys solutions?

I mean, tough to put a number on it, Nehal, but the fact that our sales has been two thirds as good as the previous year, under the current circumstances is increasing, though we are not satisfied, right. We tend to feel bad about it that we are not – we should be able to maintain our sales levels no matter what the circumstances is kind of our ambition. So two thirds, we are not thrilled about. But you're absolutely right. In relative terms versus what the market has done, the fact that our sales has kept up two thirds the previous year is encouraging, right, is definitely encouraging. And yes, we should do much better than the market once it resumes, just because I think we have improved our competitive positioning a lot more during these last 18 months than the previous 18 months. So can I put a 30% number on it? I'm not sure, Nehal, but we are very bullish about sales once the recovery reopening phase starts happening. I think we will do much better than the market and how the market does. That's what we think we will do, but don't want to make a promise on that, Nehal, don't want to get too ahead of ourselves.

Sure. Understood. And then it sounds like the level of optimism on a go-forward basis when the pre-pandemic, post-pandemic spending. That optimism remains the same as it was a quarter ago. It's just uncertainty as to when it will happen. Correct?

Correct. It has actually, Nehal, increased a bit from two quarters ago. And the main reason for why it has increased is our products are moving forward, right. The pace at which our products are improving every month is better than previous months just because the R&D team is a lot more experienced. Now we have hundreds of people who have been with us, say, for at least a couple of years who know our products inside and out. And also, as our core product modernization efforts are entering sort of the ninth-inning now, the eighth or ninth-inning, and like I told you, the first modernized InfoGenesis POS terminal actually went live and is being actively used in a prestigious restaurant in Hong Kong. In fact, there are three levels to that restaurant, and we have not yet allowed to use the name of the restaurant. And they are on iPads. So that kind of product improvement is really helping us in terms of increased confidence in our products, right. So in fact, many of our selling activities in Asia actually happens in that restaurant. And a couple of customers have seen the IG POS work on those iPads are pretty stunned by how well it is working and how sleek it is. So all that increases our confidence, right, that we will do better. So if you ask me, our confidence level is higher than to like the last quarter or the quarter before that. However, the negative is the timing still discourages us. Every time we think we are close to the light at the end of the tunnel, it seems to be pushing back by another three to six months. So that part of it is a little bit of a downer, but our own confidence is definitely increasing with every passing month mostly because of how our products are being driven forward.

Great. Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Nehal.

I'm showing no further questions in queue at this time. I'd like to turn the call back to Mr. Srinivasan for closing remarks.

Thank you, Liz. Thank you for your all your continued interest in Agilysys and your support and guidance. On behalf of our Board, our management team and the 1,300-plus team members, I'm very grateful for your attendance today and investments in Agilysys. Look forward to talking to you again around mid-May when we will be reporting our Q4 and full fiscal year 2021 results. Until then, take good care. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.