Agilysys, Inc. (NASDAQ:AGYS) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Brian Schwartz: Thank you, Ramesh. If I could just dig into again how you think about pricing in the market. You’ve had commentaries. It sounds like the products are doing well. The newer products are settling down, talked about the referenceability. If I think about what’s happening in the market this year on price increases, it seems like it’s happening almost ubiquitously across software companies. It looks like it’s visible in your end market and the RevPAR data, too. So can you talk about the desire to kind of pull that pricing and packaging lever to key pace with some of the market increases that we’ve been seeing out this year versus maybe just keeping price as is and then using it as a marketing tool against your competitors and just to take market share faster in the hospitality space. And then I have one follow-up for David. Thanks.

Ramesh Srinivasan: Yes, sure, Brian. I’m not sure if I’m appreciating your question exactly, but let me get started with the answer and please stop and correct me if I’m on the wrong path. So when you look at our pricing levels, Brian, the two main words or phrases I would use is we remain competitive. That’s number one. Number two, we are not the lowest vendor. So every RFP, every competitive sales opportunity position we get into, we generally tend to be either equal or the highest pricing vendor. So we have never compromised on that because we invest, like you know, a lot of money in R&D and we are not here to be desperate to win low-margin deals because all customers take a lot of services effort and then take a lot of support effort.

And then we have such a big R&D engine that’s going to give them value for the recurring revenue they pay us with future software versions. So we are never the lowest vendor. We are, in fact, in almost every opportunity, we are the highest vendor. And we are competitive pricing-wise because we don’t want to lose deals either, right? So we are competitive, but on the higher side already. So that’s one. Number two is when you sell a package of products, when you sell a combination of products, you have core products and then you have the experience enhanced add-on modules, our pricing tends to hold up quite well without us doing anything artificial because when you think about our competitors, there are different competitors who have strengths in different geographical and other areas, but there is practically no one providing this end-to-end ecosystem of software solutions.

When you are practically the only vendor providing that kind of end-to-end solutions, we are able to hold our pricing at pretty decent good levels. We don’t want to become too greedy with our pricing. We want to be competitive, but we are happy with where our pricing levels are Brian.

Brian Schwartz: Thanks Ramesh, you definitely answered the question. David, the one question I just wanted to ask you was just on the – your thoughts on the guidance, the annual guidance. You reiterated at this morning, this afternoon instead of flowing through the upside that you had in Q1. That’s matched with all your commentary. It sounds like you have very good predictability in terms of that guidance. My question for you is, did any revenue get pulled forward either from Q2, maybe into Q1 from faster implementations as a cause of holding back on increasing that guidance? Or did your view changed at all on your expectations for the next three quarters just based on the business and what you’ve been seeing over the last three months. Thanks David.