American Software, Inc.

and by your program is about to begin if you should need audio assistance during your call today please press the star and zero good day everyone and welcome to today's first quarter fiscal year 2021 financial results at this time all participants are in a listen only mode later you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the question and answer session you may register to ask a question at any time by pressing the star and one on your touchtone phone I will be standing by if you should need audio assistance, and it is now my pleasure to turn today's conference over to Vincent Klingas, Chief Financial Officer of American Software. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Rylan. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to American Software's first quarter fiscal 2021 earnings conference call. On the call with me is Alan Dow, President and CEO of American Software. Alan will provide some opening remarks, and then I will review the numbers. But first I'd like to remind you that this conference call may contain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding, among other things, our business strategy and growth strategy. Any such forward-looking statements speak only as of this date. These forward-looking statements are based largely on our expectations and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, some of which cannot be predicted or quantified and are beyond our control. Future developments and actual results could differ materially from those set forth in, contemplated by, or underlying the forward-looking statements. There are a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by statements made on this call. Such factors include but are not limited to changes and uncertainty in general economic conditions, the growth rate of the market for our products and services, the timely availability and market acceptance of these products and services, the effect of competitive products and pricing and other competitive pressures, and the irregular and unpredictable pattern of revenues. In light of these risks and uncertainties, there can be no assurance that the forward-looking information will prove to be accurate. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Alan for opening remarks.

Thank you, Vince. As this pandemic continues beyond our initial expectations, we know that many individuals, families, and companies have been adversely impacted, but we want to encourage everyone to stay strong. We will prevail. Personally, and on behalf of the company, I want to express our gratitude for all the frontline workers and first responders who continue to work tirelessly to keep us all safe and healthy in these extraordinary times. Furthermore, as an organization, we're pushing forward in our efforts to leverage the power of diversity within our team and to ensure equal rights for all of our teammates around our ecosystem and within our communities. Our Community Service Committee is continuing to explore ways that we can have an even bigger impact in our communities as we invest time, personal monetary contributions, and matching corporate funds. We will push forward with our community service efforts to do our part to make the world a better place for all. But we cannot condone violence of any type and hold hope that our communities, sooner rather than later, will find the path to peaceful resolution of the challenges faced in today's society. In regards to our first quarter results, I am pleased with how our team has remained focused on serving existing customers, accelerating ongoing implementations, and bringing new companies into our customer community. We remained open and fully operational as a virtual organization throughout the pandemic, to support the needs of our customers as they navigated this global crisis. We continue to create new inspirational stories with our customers as they have managed on both ends of the spectrum from explosive growth for products in high demand to managing the staggering closing and reopening of bricks and mortar retail. We continue to gain efficiency in every area of our business as we refine the operational activities to the new virtual world. Following a strong services performance in our prior quarter, we experienced a more pronounced seasonal slowdown in some projects as the customers and our team members took a much needed break using staycations and short trips to get away. However, our implementation backlog remains strong and is continuing to grow. Our services work remains 100% virtual, so we're seeing a rapid rebound in project activities as schools have reopened and folks have returned to work. Based on the seasonal nature of the services work and the backlog of project activities, we expect second quarter revenue to trend higher than Q1 and anticipate the back end of our fiscal year to be very strong after working our way through the traditionally slow calendar year and holiday period. We're pleased to see that our focus on a cloud-first strategy is paying off, where the recurring revenue stream of maintenance and cloud services now represents approximately 61% of total revenues. That's a milestone achievement. Our subscription revenue in the first quarter grew 43% year-over-year, and the growth in annual contract value for cloud services over the prior year period was 36%. We expect the percentage of recurring revenue to continue trending higher in the future based on the strong preference for subscription contracts. We had a strong start to the first quarter, but as expected, we had less access to people and saw sales cycles lengthen as we progressed into the summer. Even so, we delivered strong ATV growth on a gross basis. which was partially offset by an uptick in churn related to several customers facing economic hardships. Sales activity is picking back up, and we are continuing to see growth in our pipelines, both in the number of opportunities and the size of the transactions, leaving us confident that we will see an upward trend in the second half of the fiscal year. We welcomed five new customers in the first quarter and completed subscription or license fee transactions in five countries. During the first quarter, we added three critical new leaders to our organization who will help drive our growth. First, we were pleased to have Kevin McIntyre join our team to lead our research and development efforts. Kevin brings a fresh perspective on agile development methodologies, value-driven innovation, and a continuous learning approach to research. Second, Alex Price joined to lead our reseller channel and partner alliances for the Americas. Alex brings a wealth of experience in driving growth through a partner channel, so we're excited to have Alex on our team to help us accelerate our global sales. And last but not least, Sean Reynolds has joined us to lead our global marketing efforts. Sean brings a wealth of supply chain experience and is a career marketing professional. We have great confidence that Sean will help expand the brand awareness of our company across the globe and have a material impact on achieving our growth objectives. Looking forward, we're continuing to see an uptick in the transformational projects as we see a transition from a CFO-driven supply chain to the CEO-driven supply chain where our customers adopt our platform to radically improve the speed and quality of decision-making that allows them to achieve the agility and resiliency needed to thrive in this new economy. In summary, we're pleased by our progress as we strive for continued success to deliver exceptional value for our customers in this new digital world. We will continue to focus on making our customers more successful as we look to expand our relationship and introduce new and innovative services. We are confident that we can continue to grow both revenue and profitability in the years ahead and are proud to be delivering incremental benefits to our customers in a time when they need it most. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Vince, who will provide the details on our financial results. Vince?