Manhattan Associates, Inc.

Good afternoon. My name is Julian Bell, and I'll be your conference facilitator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Manhattan Associates Q4 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer period. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star and then one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press star and then two. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this call is being recorded today, January 28th, 2025. I would now like to introduce you to our host, Mr. Michael Bauer, Head of Investor Relations of Manhattan Associates. Mr. Bauer, you may begin your conference.

Great. Thank you, Julian, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Manhattan Associates' 2024 Fourth Quarter Earnings Call. I will review our cautionary language and then turn the call over to Eddie Capel, our CEO. During this call, including the question and answer session, we may make forward-looking statements regarding future events of the future financial performance of Manhattan Associates. You'll caution that these forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainties, are not guarantees of future performance, and that actual results may differ materially from the projections contained in our forward-looking statements. I refer you to the reports Manhattan files with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in our projections. particularly our annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal year 2023 and the risk factor discussion in that report, as well as any risk factor updates we provide in our subsequent Form 10-Qs. We note the turbulent global macro environment could impact our performance and cause actual results to differ materially from our projections. We are under no obligation to update these statements. In addition, our comments include certain non-GAAP financial measures to provide additional information to investors. We have reconciled all non-GAAP measures to the related GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation schedules in the Form 8K we submitted to the SEC earlier today and on our website at manh.com. Now, I'll turn the call over to Eddie.

Thanks, Mike. And good afternoon, everybody. Before we start, I'll just note that I've got a little bit of a sore throat, so I apologize if my voice is croaky. But thank you. Thank you for joining us as we review our results for the fourth quarter and full year, 2024, as well as our outlook for 2025. So 2024 was another very successful year for Manhattan. We surpassed the $1 billion total revenue milestone and achieved new records in RPO, total revenue, operating profit, free cash flow, and earnings per share. I'm also pleased to share with you that our Q4 RPO performance exceeded our expectations. We're entering 2025 with strong business momentum, and we're optimistic about that growing market opportunity. We do remain cautious on the global economy, though, which has become more acute. Near-term headwinds for our services business have surfaced, as about 10% of our customers with in-flight implementations reduced their planned services work for the upcoming calendar and fiscal year. And we've adjusted our outlook accordingly. Now, services continues to be very important to Manhattan. Firstly, because that team ensures our customers' success. And secondly, it keeps us close to our customers. And these tight partnerships help us provide clarity on our customers' needs, which in turn allows us to incorporate that in our future waves of innovation, helping us drive future subscription growth. Now, in 2025, we'll have a record number of customer implementations, and those customers will continue to spend significantly on Manhattan services, albeit a little less than we had previously planned. So to summarize, this shift in professional services work to future periods, some deal pushes that we highlighted throughout 2024 and to a lesser extent. reduced customization and higher partner utilization will cause services revenue to trough in the first quarter of 2025. With new service implementation projects steadily increasing throughout 2025, we anticipate solid sequential services revenue growth in the middle of the year before returning to year-over-year growth in Q4. Importantly, though, our business fundamentals are solid. And we have a large opportunity in front of us. And just like Q4, Q1 is off to a great start from a new software bookings perspective. And we enter 2025 with the benefit of several growth drivers, which include the acquisition of new customers, conversions of on-premise customers to the cloud, and cross-selling into our growing unified product portfolio. These growth drivers, along with our strong pipeline, provide us confidence that we'll achieve 20% plus cloud subscription revenue growth over the next several years, with cloud subscription revenue surpassing services revenue likely by the end of 2026. Now, let's pivot to our quarterly results just for a moment. Q4 was a record quarter that exceeded expectations. Revenue increased 7%, as reported, to $256 million, highlighted by 26% growth in CLAD. And adjusted earnings per diluted share increased 14% to $1.70. RPO, or remaining performance obligation, increased 25% to $1.8 billion. And if Foreign exchange headwinds impacts are removed. RPO exceeded $1.8 billion in our prior outlook. In Q4, customer satisfaction levels remain high. Win rates were strong at about 70%, and demand for our client solutions was solid across our product portfolio. From a vertical perspective, retail, manufacturing, and wholesale continue to drive more than 80% of our bookings in the quarter. And across our solutions, the sub-verticals are pretty diverse. Some of the cloud deals that we won this quarter, a global multi-brand specialty retailer, a diversified healthcare services company, a global home furnishings company, a supermarket chain, a global life sciences company, a global designer, retailer, and distributor of outdoor products, and many others. In Q4, About one quarter of our new bookings was generated from net new logos, and we continue to have a healthy mix of conversions, upsells, and cross-sells. And we believe this demonstrates the many and varied opportunities for sustainable future growth. Our pipeline continues to be strong with solid demand across our product suites. Net new potential customers represent about 35% of that demand, and we have significant conversion opportunities. As we enter 2025 with just a little over 80% of our on-premise customers yet to begin their migration to our cloud solutions. A key driver in our strong solutions pipeline is Manhattan's commitment to innovation. And in 2024, we invested about $138 million in research and development. This equates to nearly a billion dollars of total investment across our supply chain planning, execution, and omni-channel solutions since we began our journey for the cloud. As I stated before, I believe this level of consistent commitment is unmatched in our industry, and our investments are certainly paying off. For example, Late in 2024, we launched Manhattan Active Supply Chain Planning. We introduced IRIS, our next iteration of point of sale, and developed numerous advancements across supply chain execution. And this innovation is expanding our total adjustable market, and interest levels from our customers and prospects are certainly encouraging. In Q4, we signed our first Manhattan Active Supply Chain Planning customer, We closed two significant point-of-sale transactions, widened our leadership position in supply chain execution, and strengthened our already industry-leading levels of customer satisfaction. And turning now to some of the specifics of our products. On the point-of-sale front, 2024 was a good year for us in terms of successful deployments with some great retail brands. we successfully deployed our point-of-sale systems rapidly and at scale with leading retailers such as PacSun and Arcteryx. Both of these customers were able to roll out that cloud-native point-of-sale to their entire store fleet in a matter of weeks. And both of those companies were kind enough to speak on our behalf at the National Retail Federation Conference just a few weeks ago. And they spoke at a number of different settings at that conference, which was great. And at 2024 holiday peak data, we're finally seeing an equilibrium being reached between the percentage of sales transacted online and in-store. And as we suspected when we entered the point-of-sale business a few years ago, it's clear that store presence and performance still remains a vital ingredient for the vast majority of retailers. We believe that large-scale store technology replacement cycle is emerging, which is gonna fully decouple hardware from software in the store. In many of our store systems, customers are now running on two operating systems in the store, and sometimes even all three of the major operating systems. Now, nowhere was the resurgent interest in point of sale more apparent than the National Retail Federation Conference. The customer activity level that we had at our booth around point of sale far outpaced anything we'd seen in prior years. Now, this uptick in interest in that point of sale was no doubt driven, at least in part, from our recent terrific showing in the Forrester Wave point of sale. For the first time, we were named a leader. And we're certainly honored by this recognition. We believe it reflects the sustained investment that we've made in designing and building world-class user experience, industry-leading feature depth, and truly differentiated omni-channel capabilities, as well as unmatched ability to scale during peak periods. And speaking of Forrester, last week and for the sixth time, we were named a leader in the Forrester Omni-Channel Order Management Week. Now, no other software provider has ever received this distinction six times, and certainly no other provider has been named a leader in both point of sale and order management. And one final note on point of sale. This past quarter, Q4, we won what we believe was one of the most significant point of sale opportunities available in the Americas in 2024. We were honored to be selected by a leading tool and equipment retailer to power the next generation of store systems. And winning this business represents an important milestone for us as our leading technology platform and next-generation associate experience allowed us to demonstrate differentiating value outside of our historic sweet spot of the smaller footprint specialty retail stores. Turning to one of our other newer offerings, as I noted earlier, we signed our first Manhattan Active supply chain planning customer in the quarter, and we anticipate having this pet supplies retailer live with planning by about the middle of the year, at which point they'll be using Manhattan Active warehouse management, transportation management, store fulfillment, and planning. And this early adopter shares certainly our belief that the combination of cloud-native technology and unified applications are the key to enabling operational excellence. And to close out my product update here, I'll mention that our transportation management business ended the year on a nice high note. We closed several important and highly competitive deals right at the end of the year, with a few of these being replacements of other Gartner MQ Magic Quadrant leaders. And we believe the power of the unified supply chain execution platform and our leading technology, again, made the difference. So that concludes my business update. Dennis is going to provide you with an update on our financial performance and outlook. And then I'll close our prepared remarks with a brief summary before we move to Q&A. So, Dennis?

Okay. Thanks, Eddie. As Eddie highlighted, in 2024, we set records in RPO, total revenue, operating profit, free cash flow, and earnings per share. Congratulations to all our team members around the globe for great execution throughout the year in a challenging macro environment. For both the quarter and the year, we delivered a strong, balanced financial performance on top-line growth and operating margin. Both our Q4 and full-year results exceeded expectations, and compare favorably to the Rule of 40. I'll start with recapping our financial performance for the quarter and year. While FX volatility persists, it did not have a meaningful impact to our Q4 full year total revenue growth. However, it was a $23 million headwind to full year RPO growth and a $33 million headwind to sequential RPO growth. FX also had a meaningful impact to our 2025 guidance, which I'll discuss later. Now to our results. All growth rates are on an as-reported year-over-year basis, unless otherwise stated. Q4 total revenue was $256 million, up 7%, and full-year revenue totaled 1.04 billion, up 12%. Excluding license and maintenance revenue, which removes the revenue compression by our cloud transition, Q4 revenue growth was 11% and full year, 16%. Q4 cloud revenue totaled $90 million, up 26%, with full year revenue totaling $337 million, up 32 percent. We had record bookings in Q4 as we closed out 2024 with RPO of $1.8 billion, growing 25 percent year-over-year and 6 percent sequentially. Excluding FX impacts, RPO exceeded the high end of our $1.8 billion outlook by $13 million, as we experienced strength from across our Manhattan Active suite of products. Service revenue of $119 million was up slightly compared to the year-ago period and was $2 million below our prior expectations as budgetary constraints were more pronounced for several customers. Our Q4 adjusted operating profit was $90 million with an operating margin of 35.3% representing over a 300 basis year-over-year improvement. Full year adjusted operating profit totaled $362 million with a 34.7% operating margin and represents a 440 basis point improvement over 2023. Both Q4 and 2024 results were driven by strong cloud revenue growth combined with solid operating leverage as our cloud business scales. Our Q4 earnings per share increased 14% to $1.17 and GAAP earnings per share declined to 1% or to 77 cents. The GAAP decline includes a non-recurring $7 million or 9 cent charge from a health insurance claim on behalf of an employee. Excluding this claim, GAAP earnings per share would have increased 10%. This resulted in full year adjusted earnings per share to increase 26% to $4.72 and GAAP earnings per share to increase 24% to $3.51. Moving to cash, Q4 operating cash flow increased to 18% to $105 million with a 39.7% free cash flow margin and a 35.9% adjusted EBITDA margin. Our full year operating cash flow was $295 million while generating a 27.5% free cash flow margin and 35.3% adjusted EBITDA margin. Turning to the balance sheet, deferred revenue increased 17% year-over-year to $279 million. We ended the year with $266 million in cash and zero debt. Accordingly, we leveraged our strong cash position and invested $44 million in share repurchases in the quarter, resulting in $242 million in buybacks in 2024, given the strength of our balance sheet, solid cash collections, and increasing visibility, our board increased our share repurchase authority to $100 million, up from the prior customary $75 million. So turning to guidance. Our financial objective is to deliver sustainable double-digit top-line growth and top quartile operating margins benchmarked against enterprise software comps. As noted on prior earnings calls, our goal is to update our RPO outlook on an annual basis. Additionally, as previously discussed, our bookings performance is impacted by the number and relative value of large deals we close in any quarter, which can potentially cause lumpiness or nonlinear bookings throughout the year. All guidance references made on today's call will be at the midpoint of their respective ranges and remind investors that we provide our preliminary parameters using FX rates at the conclusion of Q3. For RPO, we are now targeting $2.11 to $2.15 billion, with the $2.13 billion midpoint representing 20% growth. Removing the $33 million FX headwind, our 2025 RPO outlook is $13 million higher than our preliminary parameters. For the full year 2025 guidance, we now expect total revenue of $1.06 to $1.07 billion. The $70 million difference from our preliminary parameters consists of $20 million of FX headwind, and as Eddie highlighted, a reduction in services revenue. This will result in Q1 total revenue of $256 to $258 million, and we are targeting total revenue of about $266.5 million in Q2, $273 million in Q3, and $269 million in Q4. For 2025 adjusted operating margin, we expect a range of 33 to 33.5%, and an FX in the range is unchanged from our prior parameters. On a quarterly basis, at the midpoint, adjusted operating margin is expected to be about 31% in Q1, 33.5% in Q2, 34.5% in Q3, and accounting for retail peak seasonality, 34% in Q4. This results in a full year adjusted EPS guidance range of $4.45 to $4.55 and a GAAP EPS range of $3.05 to $3.15 included in GAAP are 15 cents of non-recurring charges, predominantly from non-recurring health insurance claim. For Q1, we are targeting adjusted earnings per share of $1.01 to $1.03, and GAAP earnings per share of 71 cents to 73 cents. For Q2 through Q4, we expect GAAP earnings per share to be about 38 cents lower than adjusted EPS per quarter, with the vast majority accounting for our investment and equity-based compensation. So here are some additional details on our 2025 outlook. For full year 2025, we expect cloud revenue of $405 to $410 million. At the midpoint, this represents 21% growth and FX, The midpoint is unchanged from our earlier parameters. On a quarterly basis, this assumes $93.5 million in Q1, $99.5 million in Q2, and $105 million in Q3, and $109.5 million in Q4. For services, we now expect a range of $494 to $500 million. and assumes steady growth improvement throughout the year as new service projects ramp. On a quarterly basis, this assumes $117 million in Q1, $127.5 million in Q2, $130.5 million in Q3, and accounting for retail peak seasonality, $122 million in Q4. For maintenance, We expect a range of $118 to $120 million, or a 14% decline at the midpoint on attrition to cloud. On a quarterly basis, we expect Q1 to be $31.5 million, Q2 $31 million, Q3 $29 million, and Q4 $27.5 million. We expect license revenue to be roughly $13.5 million or 1% of 2025 total revenue. For Q1, we expect $8 million of license revenue and then between $1.5 to $2.5 million per quarter. For hardware, we expect revenue to be between $6.5 to $7 million per quarter. For consolidated subscription, maintenance, and services margin, we are targeting about a 50 basis point year-over-year improvement for 2025. We expect our effective tax rate to be 21 percent and our diluted share count to be 62.7 million shares, which assumes no buyback activity. Lastly, as Eddie highlighted, to better assist investors assessment of our future cloud revenue growth, we are providing incremental color on our financial model that will not be updated on a regular cadence. Accounting for our solid RPO visibility, strong pipeline, and multiple growth drivers, we expect to achieve 20% plus cloud subscription revenue growth for the next several years and will continue to invest in world-class innovation to drive future growth. So in summary, 2024 was a great year, and we are tremendously excited for 2025 and beyond. Thank you, and back to Eddie for closing remarks.

Very good. Thank you, Dennis. Well, 2024 was a very successful year for Manhattan. In Q4, we achieved record bookings. And as I mentioned before, Q1 is off to a great start as well. So we're entering 2025 with a very strong software selling motion for sure. And while there's considerable FX noise and continued macro choppiness that's causing some near-term services headwinds, structurally, Manhattan's business fundamentals are very, very solid. And we're excited about a growing market opportunity as we enter 2025. but we're the industry leader with world-class technology. Record levels of R&D investment that are increasing at TAM and contributing to our 70% plus win rates. We've got industry-leading levels of customer satisfaction and a strong pipeline with numerous drivers for durable growth. So in closing, thanks everybody for joining the call. Thank you to our global team for all the great work that they do for our customers. And that concludes our prepared remarks. So, Julian, we'd be happy to take any questions at this point.

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. One moment while we poll for questions. And our first question comes from Terry Tillman, Truist Securities.

Yeah, thanks for taking my questions. Good afternoon, Eddie, Dennis, and Mike. I might have a sore throat thing going on too here, Eddie. I have two or three questions. The first question is just related to the 127 million constant currency RPO. I think the last high watermark was way back in 4Q21 at 125.5. So, I mean, that seemed like a solid print. What I'm curious, though, you said you got started off pretty well here in first quarter. I've been asking repeatedly in the past if you're starting to see a little bit of seasonality, maybe where 4Q and 1Q are the strongest. Any more you could shed light in terms of 1Q activity and just confidence and visibility around just near-term strength and cloud bookings here in the first quarter?

Yeah, no, I mean, I'm going to answer probably the same way I have, uh, uh, you know, previously, Terry doesn't seem to be really any seasonality other than sometimes maybe in the middle of the year, you know, it was a little, uh, a little slow down due to vacations, particularly internationally and so forth. But, um, but yeah, Q4 was a, was a record for us and, uh, We're off to a strong start in Q1, so we're excited about that. The balance across the product portfolio, existing customers versus new, and the geographies was certainly encouraging as well.

Yeah, and just a follow-up question, maybe a bit of a tale of two cities, but even towards the end here in your prepared remarks, we're all listening with bated breath. And it sounds like software is actually quite resilient demand-wise. services, you're seeing some sluggishness. What I'm curious about in services, and maybe it's too early to tell, but part of this is it's a whole different model with the cloud. And you have three plus versions each year, and so there's new stuff coming out. And so I'm just curious where you think we are on cyclicality versus maybe structural dynamics with services going forward. And then I had a last question.

Yeah, there's no question that we are becoming much more efficient. implementing our software, that's having some impact. Being the now, I think, unequivocal leader in the space, there are more and more, particularly tier one partners that are implementing our software, so that's having an impact as well. But there is no question we've seen, you know, pressure on budgets. As our customers went into their budgeting cycle, call it August, September, you know, October of, you know, of last year, they were more bullish, I think, about how much they wanted to get a completed calendar year 2025. And, you know, we've got obviously a whole cadre of, fabulous tier one companies that honestly are going to continue to implement our software during 2025 and spend significant services dollars with us, just not quite as much as their teams were anticipating when they originally budgeted in the fall of last year. So I think they had their budgets pulled back a little bit, and that trickled down to us.

Got it, and just thanks for that, Eddie. And Dennis, just another question in terms of I'm curious about free cash flow. I know you don't typically guide to like a hard range or a number for free cash flow or free cash flow margin, but I'm just curious in terms of there's some kind of non-operating things that maybe impact cash flow or maybe they don't, but just anything you could share about relationship of free cash flow to either operating profit or EBITDA or just anything around just any one-time items we should think about for free cash flow. Thank you.

Yeah, I would say just in terms of cash flow through 2025, Terry, we're going to be probably at a run rate of about $300 million a quarter, roughly, and close out. You know, we're targeting about $1.2 billion on a full-year basis, cash collections.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Terry. Thank you. Our next question comes from Joe Brink, Baird. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. SAP on their earnings call overnight, they touched on this dynamic where large customers are also making cloud commitments, but initially maybe it's only one-third of the potential scope, and then the expectation is these customers come back one or two years later with another contract. Is this at all this dynamic happening with your WMS engagements? I know typically, you know, you might not grab the full warehouse footprint, and that just represents room for future expansion. Is any of that happening in kind of the changes and kind of service intentions you're noting here?

Not really, Joe. That's happened quite a lot for, frankly, several years now. So oftentimes our customers, whatever the number may be, they may have 10 or 15 distribution centers and they'll commit to one, two, or three. So that is not a new dynamic for us. We've seen it for several years and we expect that to be ongoing. So it's not a new dynamic and it's not having any you know, kind of near-term impact.

Okay, thank you for that. Could you maybe provide an update of your year-end RPO mix? I think in the past you've kind of given a breakout, WMS, Active Omni, TMS, and I'm wondering, you know, obviously it sounds like you got some big wins in point of sale at year-end. If that product mix begins to shift, does that actually contribute to a shift in kind of services intensity around what needs to happen? And so that also factors in kind of your go-forward, you know, quote, unquote, right-size headcount.

Yeah, yeah, great set of, you know, a couple of conjoined questions there, Joe. In reverse sequence, though, the answer is not really. You know, there's not really a big difference across the portfolio in terms of services attach rate. So whether it be, you know, planning, point of sale, WMS, TMS, OMS, all at least directionally similar services attach rate. In terms of the breakdown of RPO, we don't provide a detailed breakdown there. I would tell you that the preponderance certainly comes from WMS, followed by OMS, followed by TMS, and then sort of other. But there's no question. It's slow. There's nobody more impatient with this than me. But the point-of-sale implementation activity, subscription activity, and sales activity definitely seems to be picking up. So we're encouraged by that for sure.

Great. I'll leave it there. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you, Joe.

And our next question comes from Brian Peterson with Raymond James. Please proceed.

Thanks. And maybe just following up on Joe's question, Eddie, I think in the past you've mentioned some stats on the number of active WM customers that are signed or live. You know, just as we think about the progress that you've made as we have about 20% through that transition, any help on maybe giving a little more specifics on where we stand entering that transition in 2025? Yep.

Well, in terms of number of live customers and so forth? Correct. I think we're a little more than 150 live customers, about 600, a little over 600 facilities around the world. And yeah, we're just a tick below 80% of our customers still on-premise. So the inverse of that is not quite 20% have migrated.

Got it, and I just wanted to follow up on point of sale. I was out at InterRef as well, and I agree with you that the interest was definitely there. As you've seen a lot of product cycles and macro cycles in the past, I'd love to get your sense of what is the customer optimism around this kind of cloud-based point of sale refresh And how much momentum do you think that you could see there in 2025? Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know if I can quantify exactly how much momentum. Brian loved to be able to do that, probably stay away from the specifics of that. But in terms of the enthusiasm for replacement cycles and so forth, I think, look, we've been talking about this for a little while, but I think there is enthusiasm around upgrading technology, store system technology. Some of it is merely driven by the hardware aging out in the stores. It's just aging out, as you probably know as a consumer. Some of it is driven by the retailer's desire to have a true omni-channel selling strategy. in their retail store versus this very bifurcated online and foot traffic strategy. But as you pointed out, as we pointed out in our prepared remarks, definitely a lot more enthusiasm and interest at NRF. You would expect that being a retail federation conference, but we certainly saw a lot of you know, frankly, unsolicited, invaluable interest at the conference, which was encouraging.

Great to hear. Thanks, Adam.

Thank you, Brian.

Our next question comes from Quinton Gabrielli with Piper Sandler. Please proceed.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking our questions here. You know, maybe first, it'd be helpful to understand kind of the magnitude of deal pushouts that we talked about in Q2 and Q3, and how much that impacted kind of the strong constant currency Q4 bookings here. And is it fair to kind of assume that all of those prior push deal closed this quarter, or is there incremental opportunity in Q1 and Q2 for those to catch up?

No, they have not all closed. We're obviously not going to give detailed empirical specifics around that, but some of them have closed and some haven't. The good news is of all of those deals across the last 12 months, maybe even longer, that have been in the pipeline that haven't closed just yet, we haven't lost them. So there's still opportunities out there for us. You know, there are certainly circumstances where a company will enter into a buying cycle, and as they get toward the end of it, decide they're going to push out a full year, right, the full year of the budgetary cycle. So, you know, we don't like it, but it's not an uncommon phenomenon.

Got it. That's helpful to understand. And then maybe on the services line, obviously it's creating some messiness here in 2025. I understand there's some effects. Yeah. kind of out of your control, but does this accelerate the company's desire or decision to maybe focus more on leveraging large partners and accelerating kind of your cloud transition first and kind of pushing the services to the side? Or how do you balance that decision of pushing services while also accelerating that cloud growth? Thanks.

Yeah, that's a great question, Quentin. So, as I said in my prepared remarks, and we've been frankly saying this for a very long time, in 2026, we expect software revenue to exceed services revenue. Obviously, with the growth with 20% or so, growth on the software line, you know, that makes perfect sense. Now, obviously, that tells you what the trajectory looks like in 27, 28, and so on and so forth, going forward. So, software is continuing to grow at a faster rate than services. Now, services is still very important to us, very important to us. You know, you could put a case together. It's not as important as to long-term top-line growth as software is, of course, because that's the core of what we do, core of what we build, and where our innovation investments go. But services are very important for a couple of reasons. One, we feel it's important that we be engaged with the client to ensure that they get great success from our software. And second of all, our customers are really an important part of our secret innovation source. So staying very close to them so we understand what market trends are, we can build innovation to be, as I often say, one-eighth of a pace in front of them in the market is very, very important. But again, you bring up a good point there, but no. No intentions of moving away from the services business, but we certainly expect growth. software revenue to continue to grow much faster with that line crossing in 2026.

Hey, Quentin, it's Dennis Story. I just need to, one, apologize. On the 2025, the free cash flow target should be $300 million with end-of-year, full-year $1.2 billion in cash collections.

Got it. Thank you both.

Sure thing. Thank you. Our next question comes from Mark Shaple with Loop Capital Markets. Please proceed.

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Eddie, starting with you, what's the sentiment from CIOs that you're seeing out there on moving forward with, say, big WMS or even TMS upgrades or expansions? Are you seeing these initiatives being crowded out by other priorities?

I would say from a sentiment perspective, now, obviously, we have a much more diverse customer base than just retail. But if we think about, you know, kind of the concentration of conversations that you're able to have in one place at NRF, which is no question retail, but if we compare January of 2024 with January of 2025, so just a couple, three weeks ago, my view would be the tone was much more enthusiastic than it was 12 months prior.

Great, thank you. And then... Switching gears a little bit here, with respect to the new supply chain planning solutions, I wonder if you could just provide some additional color or comments on the reference customers that you built up during the quarter.

Yeah, well, we signed our first customer in the quarter, which honestly was sort of a surprise. You know, when you launch a mission-critical application such as supply chain planning, you know, on our prior call, I know there were some questions about, you know, when should we expect to see some impact and so forth. And, you know, our initial estimates were that we would close our first customer, you know, kind of mid-year 2025. So, you know, we couldn't be more excited that, what you know 65 days or something like that after launch uh we you know we closed our first uh deal now we had seen and continue to see a ton of enthusiasm around bringing finally supply chain planning and supply chain execution together on a truly unified platform but you know that enthusiasm usually takes quite a while to translate into into deals closing so Again, to have that first visionary and early adopter customer after 65 days or so certainly gives us reason for enthusiasm. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Mark.

Thank you. And our next question comes from William Jellison with D.A. Davidson. Please proceed.

Hey, thanks for taking my question. Um, the first relates to professional services and I wanted to get an update because in the past you've spoken to, uh, some, some strong increases in efficiency within that organization in part related to record low attrition in, in the services labor force. And I was just curious on where we are with those kinds of trends and in light of the updated expectations for services in 2025. How are you thinking about hiring in that organization?

Yep. Great question. Well, great questions. So first of all, efficiency continues to grow and efficiency continues to get better. There's no question about that. And attrition is certainly very low. in a professional service organization. So again, that continues to be a driver of efficiency. You know, in terms of hiring, obviously, you know, we've got to balance out supply and demand to state the very obvious. We've seen a down tick in demand, so we'll keep a very close eye on what that profile looks like. We expect it to start picking up in the back half of the year, but we've got time to be able to monitor that situation before we decide specifically what the hiring profile in services for 2025 looks like.

Great. Thanks for taking my question.

Thank you, William. And our next question comes from Dylan Becker with William Blair. Please proceed.

Thank you, gentlemen. Appreciate it here. Don't want to continue hammering on the point of services maybe, but Eddie, for you, any additional color on the types of projects that are being pushed here? You talk about kind of the number of record customers onboarding are expected to go live in 25, growing enthusiasm, which I would – I would agree with kind of general tone and sentiment coming out of NRF, but what's causing lower spending, and maybe how can we think about the mix of that $50 million impact between the internal efficiency and partnership versus maybe what's kind of being pushed out from a project perspective?

Well, obviously, we're not going to provide the specifics of how that $50 million exactly breaks down, but the phenomenon goes something like this. that we have a customer with a large-scale program, and they're going to roll out maybe WMS across a big estate, or maybe they're going to roll out OMS across multiple brands. Let's say, hypothetically, it was 10 distribution centers they were planning in 2025 or five brands in 2025 in the case of OMS. What we're seeing is the WMS rollout continues, but instead of doing 10 distribution centers in 2025, you know, it's going to be seven. Instead of doing five brands for OMS in 2025, it's going to be three of the brands. That's the type of phenomenon that we're seeing. We have seen no projects be canceled, right? So there's no project cancellations and so forth, but just budgets have been clipped, so you know, our customers have tended to slow down some of those rollouts. Okay.

Okay, that's really helpful. Maybe one more sticking with you, Eddie, here. If we think about, again, the early momentum of adaptive planning and the importance of kind of planning and forecasting here, help us understand maybe where the industry sits from a data readiness perspective if we think about kind of that adoption curve. Maybe it ties into cloud modernization, but how that flows through to their willingness or propensity to kind of get more real time in that data and maybe how the latter can help accelerate or fuel the former. Thank you.

Yeah, the data's ready. The data is available and ready for sure. You know, because they run, you know, generally overnight batch jobs. They've got all the data, they queue it up, they run a large batch job, you know, overnight to create a forecast and a plan. And to some extent, so we're going to be using essentially the exact same data inputs But instead of accumulating it and running it overnight, we're able to run it in real time and take a slice of the plan and the forecast at any point along the way, enabling essentially the speed of the planning process to catch up with the speed of execution. Because the execution systems obviously have gained in pace over the last, longer really, but over the last 10 or 15 years. And one of our goals is to make sure that planning starts to catch up with execution pace. So, no concerns about the data availability. I would tell you, just like everything else that we do, it is there's a lot of change management that goes into moving from a batch-based system to a real-time processing system. So unlikely to be the lack of data availability, more likely to be, you know, getting through that change management process.

Very helpful. Thanks, Eddie.

Sure thing.

And our final question will come from George Korosawa with Citi. Please proceed.

Hi, thanks for taking the questions. Sorry to start with politics here, but maybe just kind of the current house view on how you're thinking about the potential impact of tariffs on your business and if there's any kind of changes to your positioning.

Yeah, sure. Good, good, good question. From our perspective, you know, no tariffs really we expect on our business. Obviously, we're monitoring tariffs. the situation from a supply chain perspective, and if there are any impacts to, you know, to our customers. Now, given that we are largely a finished goods supply chain systems provider, so most of what we do happens when the goods hit the port, you know, hit the ports from wherever they come from, you know, there's likely to be a little impact. you know, on Manhattan Source here, George.

Okay, makes perfect sense. And then I did want to ask on the margin guide, I think maybe tick down a tiny bit from your initial target. To me, I guess I would intuitively think that, you know, with software being relatively stronger than services, maybe there'd be some mixed benefit. Are there any kind of OpEx lines that you're looking to invest more in or just any kind of color on the change there?

Well, look, we will increase our investment in research and development in 2025. You know, we're frankly proud. I'm proud to have been able to say for the last, you know, 15 years running, we're going to spend more in research and development this year than we did last year. So that is true, again, of 2025 over the last 15 years for sure. We will spend more money in sales and marketing given that we've got a broader product portfolio. Obviously, we've got the FX noise and some impact from top-line revenue decline.

Makes sense. Thanks for taking the questions.

My pleasure, George. Thank you.

There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the floor back to Eddie Cable for closing remarks.

Thank you, Julian. Thanks, everybody, for toughening out with me with my croaky voice. Really appreciate it. I mentioned before, whilst we've seen some choppiness here, we've seen a little downturn in the services business for 2025. Our fundamentals are very strong because our fundamentals are built around product innovation. We're continuing to innovate. The demand for that innovation is strong. So we are as encouraged as we've ever been about our long-term future, and we'll look forward to telling you more about that in 90 days or so. So thanks again.

And with that, that does conclude today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time.