Hello, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Progress Software Corp. First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the call over to Michael Micciche, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Okay. Thank you, Twanda. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for Progress Software's First Fiscal Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. Joining me on the call are Yogesh Gupta, President and CEO; and Anthony Folger, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, please consider our safe harbor statement as follows. During this call, we will discuss our outlook for future financial and operating performance, corporate strategies, product plans, cost initiatives and other information that might be considered forward-looking. Such forward-looking information represents Progress Software's outlook and guidance only as of today and is subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may vary materially. For a description of the factors that may affect our future results and operations, please refer to the risk factors in our SEC filings, particularly the Risk Factors section of our most recent Form 10-Q and the latest 10-Q being filed in conjunction with this announcement. Progress assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements included in this call. Additionally, please note that all the financial figures referenced on this call are non-GAAP measures unless otherwise indicated. You can find a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP figures in our earnings press release, which was issued after the market closed today. This document contains additional information related to our financial results for the first quarter of fiscal '26, and I recommend that you reference it for specific details. We've also provided a slide presentation that contains supplemental data for our first quarter and provides additional highlights and financial metrics. Both the earnings release and the supplemental presentation are available on the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.progress.com. Today's call is being recorded in its entirety and will be available for replay on the Investor Relations section of our website shortly after we finish. Yogesh, let me turn it over to you.

Thanks, Mike. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We're very pleased to share our first quarter results with you today, so let's get right to it. We had another very good quarter. Revenue was $248 million, up 4% from last year's Q1. ARR grew 2% in constant currency over the same period and NRR remained strong at 99%. EPS for the quarter was $1.60, up 22% year-over-year as operating margins finished above 41%. We saw record cash flows as a result of strong focus on collections. Adjusted free cash flow was $99 million and unlevered free cash flow was $111 million. The balance sheet remains in great shape as we continue to aggressively pay down debt while also repurchasing shares. This strong performance is driven by AI and other innovations across our portfolio that are resonating with our customers. Now more than ever, our products remain mission-critical, our customers remain loyal, and our team continues to execute at a high level. These are also the reasons why we remain positive about our outlook. As always, the foundation underpinning our success is our total growth strategy. We continue to run the business with discipline as we innovate across the product portfolio and provide increasing value to our shareholders -- to our customers. That formula has worked for us through multiple technology shifts and industry transformations, and it continues to work today. On M&A, our corporate development team is betting deals aggressively and we further fine-tuned ShareFile operations, which continues to perform very well as one of our best acquisitions. Lastly, customer success remains our key focus. Now let me address the 3 topics that we know are top of mind. First, our business remains strong. We see solid retention and good performance across our products. Our product portfolio…

All right. Thanks, Yogesh, and good afternoon, everyone. As you heard Yogesh's remarks, we're very pleased with our Q1 results, and we're excited to share a strong start to our fiscal year. So let's get right into the numbers, starting with ARR, which, as we've discussed, provides the best view into our top line performance. We closed Q1 with ARR of approximately $863 million, representing 2% pro forma year-over-year growth. For clarity, our pro forma results include ARR from acquired businesses in all periods presented. This growth in ARR reflects a broad-based contribution from across our portfolio, including OpenEdge, ShareFile, Loadmaster, WhatsUp Gold, MOVEit and our DevTools products. Consistent with prior quarters, our net retention rate remains strong, coming in at 99%, underscoring the resilience of our customer base and the mission-critical nature of our products. We did see some isolated churn in the quarter, which we expect to work through quickly, and we still delivered solid growth, thanks to strength in new customer wins and expansion in the installed base. Two areas positively influenced by our investments in AI and innovation. As a reminder, we calculate ARR in constant currency with all periods presented at current year budgeted exchange rates. Consistent with past practice, we've updated ARR using 2026 budgeted exchange rates. And as a result, ARR reported in prior periods has changed. The change is not material and doesn't alter the trend in ARR growth, although the previously reported ARR and NRR numbers changed slightly. The details of this update are included in the supplemental financial presentation filed with our press release. In addition to solid ARR growth, Q1 revenue of $248 million came in ahead of our expectations and reflects 4% growth on a year-over-year basis, led by strong performance in OpenEdge. As we've mentioned on previous…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Ittai Kidron with Oppenheimer & Company.

Numbers. I have a couple of questions. Yogesh, maybe starting with you on the M&A front, I mean 1 would think that in this current environment, it'll be even easier for you to buy companies. I'm kind of wondering -- I know you've always been very disciplined, of course, on the metrics that you're looking for, but why is it still taking you this long to find the next one.

So Ittai, 2-part answer to that question. One is that, as Anthony just mentioned, right, there is a clearly a higher bar today given where our own company stock is and our valuation is compared to what it historically was, right? So we are trading now at an EBITDA multiple that we would need to pay less to generate additional incremental value for our shareholders. So I think that creates a constraint on what we can pay. So that's part A. And I'm not saying that, that's why we haven't bought companies, but that's an important consideration in terms of the filter we can apply to the companies we can look at. The second one is we want to make sure that we find the right assets. And we are truly very active at this point looking at those. But again, as I said, that combination creates a challenge. And the flip side is that even though the public markets are where they are, the private markets Ittai, are still, let's just say, disconnected from reality, if what the public markets are is the reality, right? So at least they're disconnected from the public markets on the valuation side. So I think those two things are really it. We actually see tremendous activity in the market. We are seeing all kinds of companies come around. And obviously, everybody on this call will be the first to know when we do one.

Got it. And then Anthony, for you, can you talk about your SaaS revenue. It's kind of -- it's actually down quite substantially on a quarter-over-quarter basis. You guys talked about ShareFile actually doing well for you. But you did mention on the call some elevated churn, isolated churn, I think you called it. So we'd love to get a little bit more color on what isolated churn means and why is the SaaS revenue declining quarter-over-quarter.

Yes, sure, Ittai. And maybe I'll take the isolated churn comment first because I do think they're a little bit different in terms of the isolated churn and the SaaS revenue. But in terms of isolated churn, yes, we had a couple of, I'd say, customer-specific events that weren't really related to product value or competitive dynamics or really a broader trend in the business. And to give you an example, we had a 7-figure government contract in Eastern Europe for data retention services and a European court ruled, the government had to cease retaining the data. And so as a result, contract churned out, right? So not because of any dissatisfaction with our product or competitive loss, but the underlying use case effectively gets eliminated by a court rule. And so occasionally, we see issues like that. We've seen them in the past. We've talked about it. M&A sometimes can be something that may cause a little bit of churn in our business. So like in times past, not material overall and really specific to a particular situation. And I think something will probably work through pretty quickly. And despite that, having put up 2% ARR growth for the quarter was a pretty good testament to new customer acquisition and some of the expansion that we got out of the base. So that was the -- what I was referring to in terms of the any sort of isolated churn. In terms of the SaaS dynamics on revenue, if you'll recall, back in Q4, we were asked about a big sequential increase in our SaaS revenue. And I think I said at the time that it was a little bit of an upside surprise. And we expected things to normalize in 2026 and sort of come back in line…

Our next question comes from the line of John DiFucci with Guggenheim Securities.

My first question is for Yogesh. So Yogesh, it was interesting that you mentioned Chef's doing really well and one of your best acquisitions performance-wise. As you know, the developer seat count, I'm glad you said that because there's a lot of concern out there with the developer seat count, and it's -- there's a huge debate out there. I guess you're doing well here, but are you seeing -- take Chef out of it. I mean -- when you talk to your customers, when you see what they're doing, are you seeing any change in developer numbers at your customer base? And whether that could be like they're not hiring as much as they used to be or they're actually declining or they're not declining. Whatever you're seeing? And then secondly, why is it regardless of what that answer is, why is it that Chef's doing so well?

So I think, by the way, just I think -- I don't know whether it was the audio or whether it would mean or which end but John, the product I mentioned that's doing really well with ShareFile, not Chef. A misunderstanding. But anyway, let me talk about the developer scenario, though, because our developer products are doing well, right? And so the reason I think -- so there are two parts. So I think first, talking about our customers, what we are seeing, I believe that there is a change in trend, but I wouldn't say that the absolute developer numbers overall appear to be dropping. The absolute numbers have dropped in what I would call a small number of customers. But by and large, I think the trend is less growth than historic. And so I think that the developer seats and seat-based developer businesses which primarily is DevTools for us, which is a relatively small business. It's about -- it's a single digit -- mid-single-digit percentage business for us, right? That business is where if we didn't do the right things, we would see challenges. So what we have done is we've actually done significant AI investments there to make our developer tools, which are primarily libraries for developing great UI and so on, be more relevant in the agentic age, help with developers who are building agentic apps and provide them with the right tooling for that. So we are effectively doing a significant amount of change in that, what I call, the value proposition for the developer. And so we feel good about how that business continues to perform. But it is a business that has the greatest potential risk, which is why it has also had the greatest acceleration on our part in terms of the AI work that we have done with it. And so we're seeing good business there, and we continue to see good business there. I think that the products like Chef continue to do well because infrastructure needs to be managed, infrastructure needs to be configured, infrastructure needs to be set up so that things run well. And so that product is a workhorse for many large enterprises, including the largest credit -- pretty much every credit card company pretty much many of the Silicon Valley tech companies, et cetera. I mean, literally, 2 of the MAX 7 have been customers forever. So it is a very, very strong and solid product. And we continue to see basically the need for that product, and we win some new customers as well, which -- but I think the ShareFile product, on the other hand, is doing well from a customer perspective as well because of the AI efforts there. So I'm sorry about the confusion about my voice. I'm sorry about that.

No. Yogesh, it wasn't you. I'm sure it's me. I can't hear that well sometimes. But thank you for answering the second question, which was, I think, more important anyway. And I guess just a follow-up for Anthony. I want to follow up to Ittai's question on the SaaS business because it does sound like ShareFile is doing really well. And it's a big acquisition, and it's your first big SaaS acquisition, Big SaaS acquisition. But the SaaS revenue didn't just decline sequentially. It declined to less than it was the last 3 quarters. And so that like -- I mean it's not like just the fourth quarter was stronger. It's like the last 3 quarters were stronger. So can you help us a little bit because something odd happened. And it sounds like the business is doing really well. You guys have said it several times, even if I heard it wrong. But what is it that what happened this quarter, like it wouldn't have been just like recognition. Sometimes I can imagine you don't get the renewal and you're not recognizing it and then you recognize it like -- but it's not just the fourth quarter that was stronger than this quarter. Sorry.

Yes. I got it, John. And yes, I think, the range of SaaS revenue for the business overall has been -- if I were to normalize for the cleanup issues that I sort of referred to, it's between $72 million and $73 million, going back to, I don't know, Q1 of last year. So that's if I sort of normalize each of these quarters. And all that's happening is we talked about it a little bit last year that taking over the billing system from CSG was a pretty significant milestone in terms of integration. And in the back half of the year, as we started to get our arms around the data, there was a lot of cleanup that needed to be done. In some cases, we had customers that haven't been billed and needed to get invoiced, they required some catch-up invoicing and there were some that needed to be written out of ARR or reserved against revenue for whatever reason. And there was just a lot of data that we really didn't have access to pre-acquisition and even with CSG doing a lot of the billings under the TSA. In the back half of last year as we started to clean that up. Again, not material overall. But if it's a few million dollars here and there as we go quarter-to-quarter, it may move that number around a little bit. And that's really all it was. I mean, otherwise, you're right. The ShareFile business, if I were to sort of normalize these things out, like I said, $72 million to $73 million for total SaaS revenue on a quarterly basis is where it's been.

Okay. And that's helpful. But should -- is it cleaned up now, Anthony, should we assume that this should behave like a listen, we didn't expect a lot of growth out of it, but just even if it's solid or steady or will -- or could we potentially see some declines going forward too?

No, I think it is largely cleaned up in any of these cleanup issues that we need to do will get smaller and smaller as we go forward. So I don't expect significant issues with it. I mean, as Yogesh said, the business fundamentally from an operational perspective has been incredibly solid.

Our next question comes from the line of Lucky Schreiner with D.A. Davidson.

Great. Maybe and apologies to follow up again on the line of questioning here. But on that isolated churn event. If I remember last quarter, I believe you guys talked to not seeing an impact of multiyear contracts for this year. And so it sounds like maybe visibility there changed. Is that related to the isolated churn event? Or is that something different?

Lucky, not really. When the EU court puts out a statement saying, "Thou shall stop immediately." This was an Eastern European government. They basically instantly told that they were going to stop paying. And so this was actually -- the customers were local telephone customers, local -- and this was call records of phone calls that people make. And when that became -- that was deemed illegal, the country immediately, government immediately said to all those call record companies and all the telephone companies saying, "Hey, can't retain this anymore, delete it all, and we will not pay you anymore starting right now." So it was what I would call a surprise churn, right? It was one of those things where they just happened to say, sorry, we can't pay you anymore because we've got -- we're not getting paid anymore. So it's a weird thing, right? I mean we could go and tell them, hey, you have a contract, it doesn't expire for a little bit. But at the same time, we really -- when governments do those kind of things, I think it's tough to get folks to comply. So we wanted to basically take the churn, and we'll take them the churn.

Got you. So yes, it sounds like visibility hasn't changed then.

Maybe not at all. This was unusual. This was truly unusual. It was -- the decision came out, the government acted and the service providers had to act. I mean it was within a matter of 2 weeks and completely from left field.

Got you. That's helpful. Maybe then on NRR. I know you guys are within your target framework. But what's going to take to get that above the 100% target? Is that a function of just working through the recent churn event? And you mentioned maintaining a close watch on the macro. Is that at all playing a factor here?

So I don't feel that today macro is playing a factor for our business. I can't speak for the rest of the world. But for Progress, I believe, this is purely because of the isolated churn that we saw. And as you know, Lucky, because our NRR is a trailing 4-quarter number, it moves rather slowly and so it will take us a little bit to get us back. Our target continues to be being at or above 100%. I mean our goal says 100% NRR is our goal. And -- but we've actually fluctuated between 99% and 101%, by and large, for the last few years. I think occasionally, we've touched 102%, but by and large, it's been between 99% and 101%. So we actually feel good about our business. And we also feel good, Lucky, that we were able to grow ARR by 2% year-over-year, which is another point because -- when you think about it, when NRR is somewhat light, it doesn't take much for first few tens of basis points of things to move. The fact that we were able to grow our ARR 2% year-over-year means that obviously, new customers are embracing us and our expansions continue to be good, et cetera. So we continue to be confident we are not concerned about the way the business is going at this stage. And the reason why caveat at this stage is the macro and the geopolitical events going on, which I think -- I mean the uncertainty around those, I don't have to sort of share with anyone that we all know that basically, some days, people think in the morning, it's going to be okay and the evening is going to be not okay. So with that kind of uncertainty, unclear as to what will happen in the market. We will continue to monitor that very, very closely. But so far, we have not seen any instance or any example or any anecdotal evidence, anything at all to say that macro is having an impact on us.

[Operator Instructions] I'm showing no further questions in the queue. I would now like to turn the call back over to Yogesh for closing remarks.

Well, thank you, everyone, for joining. It's a pleasure to speak with you all, and we look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Bye-bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.