PowerSchool Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:PWSC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Eric Shander: Yes. No, it’s a great question. And I think the most important way to kind of think about this, there is some timing of activity between Q3 and Q4. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, there was some L&O activity that happened in Q3 that timing of it could have been Q3, Q4. It could have been either or but we saw some of that happen in Q3. But what I think is most important is if you think about the full year from an adjusted EBITDA perspective, we are raising by $2 million. We are investing in this integration work that we have. We’re super pleased with the Q3 performance. And what I would say is as you think about the full year, we’ll end the full year around 33% in total. That’s going to be up 2 points from where we ended full year 2022 which, again, is a full percentage point above our financial model.

So we’re hitting on all cylinders from a profit standpoint. So again, it’s just going to be some minor quarter variability but I think it’s the most important to kind of think about where we’re going to be for the full year.

Patrick McIlwee: Yes. Understood. And then my second question. You said ARR for data products. I think in the past — maybe last quarter was up almost 100% year-over-year. And it sounds like traction there is — continue to be really strong this quarter. Is there any additional color you can give on what exactly customers are using these products for at this point and then how you might expect that to evolve in the coming quarters and years?

Hardeep Gulati: Sure, Patrick. You’re absolutely right, our growth rate continues to be pretty strong. And there are multiple use cases we are actually seeing. We saw a lot of use case first for understanding student engagement, right, in terms of, hey, where are my students, who’s showing up on the class, what kind of performance we have. We saw that use case has further evolved into what we call MTSS, multi-tier system of support. We actually launched this a couple — 2 years back and, in fact, had full rollout of this even at a state level in Alabama for the coming school year where every school district in Alabama has a full MTSS support for every student where they can comprehensively look at interventions and support programs for each student.

If a kid is not pretending, you have support plans and intervention strategy for that. If a kid is behind on the academic side, how do you provide support for them. If kid has social, emotional, what support or strategies would be required for there. And similarly, you can keep going on career pathways and basically driving a very comprehensive way for supporting every student depending upon their individual need but scaling it to be able to do that at a district level, at a state level and bringing all the resources. And that has been one of the huge growth areas over the last, call it, 12, 18 months. But we’re also seeing a huge amount of interest now on Connected Intelligence. On the data product element, we’re just bringing one data source where it actually is your data sandbox or you kind of think about your data lake.

You’re bringing data not just from PowerSchool systems, from your other systems, being able to have all kind of reporting and correlations, things which you may not even understand of where the challenges are, being able to have the data tell you that and also being able to have that as your [indiscernible] for security, being able to have it for your — being able to have a long-term audit as well on that. So it has become a very strong data along with the Insights strategy and we are seeing interest as we talked about the huge LA deal, Montana deal around not just the data strategy but tying it up to even workforce planning. So you can have a K-20 view on your students and understand where the students are and how you’re going to support them.

So these use cases continue to be really expansive. One of the very exciting things to you in terms of future, what we are seeing is actually interest around AI and how — think about how this Connected Intelligence is letting districts be able to use — where they can bring their AI to the data so they can actually run their AI tools on top of Connected Intelligence rather than taking all the data and putting in the AI tools and having not — risk of security and everything with these new technologies. So that has been also of very strong interest. We do expect — we are launching a lot of focus on educator analytics as well. That’s going to be a phenomenal growth area for us as well and also on the career in K-20 broadly. So we do see this to be one of our highest growth area and you’re going to see continued very exciting opportunities here.

Operator: The next question is from Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs.

Unidentified Analyst: This is Cally Valenty [ph] on for Gabriela. Congrats on the quarter. First one for me would be, since the Investor Day, I’ve seen a few more press releases with deals that include kind of SIS plus some of the recent add-on functionality you’ve acquired or built out maybe in the customer space or some of the other modules. They seem very complementary to like the core SIS system though. And I wanted to ask, how important have these add-on modules been such as like special programs or behavioral support to the success you’ve been seeing in SIS and then just more broadly?

Hardeep Gulati: Great question, Callie and great to talk to you. I think, Callie, one of the things that I remember we talked about in the Investor Day with you was our — how we are launching our clouds, right, rather than selling individual products but selling multiple add-on products like forms management, document management, special education. Similarly in the classroom, not just trying to sell LMS or assessment but also selling curriculum and instruction and selling behavior as we are looking at the student success, not just MTSS but also selling attendance interventions so — and behavior elements, so you can actually look at the holistic way of providing support. We are seeing a good cross-sell of multiple of these modules happening at the same time.