American Software, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMSWA) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Allan Dow: Yeah. Anja, thanks for joining us. Yes. Good question. Definitely we are going to continue to see some volatility. It’s not about whether these projects are there. It’s really that approval cycle that’s out there. We have got active campaigns going well into the cycle. There’s a lot of potential for our Q1, a lot of potential for our Q2, and then, of course, we are into the new budget season for the new fiscal year, people are spending money at the wrap-up of the calendar year and new money at the kickoff of the new calendar year. So we got a couple of selling cycles that will help us here. But it seems like we get some good news. And then all of a sudden, we get some troubling news and people take a big deep breath and pause for a moment.

So we are doing our best to accelerate those to not allow those delays to give them confidence to move forward and seek approvals, but there’s limited impact we can have on getting that done. So we are doing the best we can. So we will see some volatility in the remainder of this year. We will see some ups and downs. But, overall, those ups and downs will be mixed in with the trend of growth, we are confident of that.

Anja Soderstrom: Okay. Thank you. And in terms of M&A, what do you see there in terms of the environment and valuations and what are you looking for specifically in terms of acquiring something?

Allan Dow: Yeah. Let’s — we will talk about our — what we are seeking for. We are going to stick to our knitting. We want applications that are complementary to what we have today in the Supply Chain planning space. Our strategy on that is driven by the fact that we have an installed base that knows us for Supply Chain planning to the extent that we can provide new and expansive opportunities for those clients we sell back in. We are looking for things that would allow us to incent people to do this lift in shift we were talking about. That would be helpful to find one of those in the mix. We want technology synergies. We want proven capabilities in the marketplace so that we can put them right to work. We don’t want to have to go be the test pad for new ideas.

We want to be — we want to find proven opportunities that have some revenue proof points behind them. So they have got subscription revenue going. So we have got a number of things in the works. We are very active in the dialogue. We anticipate that while we are all contemplating our summer breaks here and long before kids go back to school, if you have them, that we will have tucked in at least one of these potential opportunities that lie ahead and we are not going to pause there, we are going to keep going. We intentionally with the Starboard acquisition we did last summer, we put a conscious thought process into using that as a template for acquisitions and ingestion and how we would manage those acquisitions. So that one went so well and our template worked well and we learned a little bit from it that we have modified now that we have no reason to pause even if we pull in one, assumes we can find the second one, if it’s a month later or two months later or three months later, we will pull the trigger on that as well.