Pegasystems Inc.

And at this time, I would like to turn things over to Ken Stilwell, COO and CFO. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Pegasystem's first quarter 2021 earnings call. Before we begin, I would like to read our safe harbor statement. Certain statements contained in this presentation may be construed as forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The words expects, anticipates, intends, plans, believes, will, could, should, estimates, may, targets, strategies, projects, forecasts, guidance, likely, and usually, or variations of such words and other similar expressions, identify forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date the statement was made and are based on current expectations and assumptions. Because such statements deal with future events, they are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Actual results for the fiscal year 2021 and beyond could differ materially from the company's current expectations. Factors that could cause the company's results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements are contained in the company's press release announcing its Q1 2021 earnings and in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020, and other recent filings with the SEC. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, and there are no assurances that the matters contained in such statements will be achieved. Although subsequent events may cause our view to change, except as required by applicable law, we do not undertake and specifically disclaim any obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as the result of new information, future events, or otherwise. And with that, I will turn the call over to Alan Treffler, founder and CEO of Pegasystems.

Thank you, Ken, and thank you to all our investors. Our Q1 results demonstrate the continued progress we're making in our shift to a recurring revenue model. Our total ACV, the best indicator we think of our future revenue growth, increased by 20% for the quarter year-over-year, while revenue grew 18%. We continue to accelerate PegaCloud growth with PegaCloud ACV up 55% year-over-year. In addition, more than 50% of our new commitments in Q1 were pegaclap. Now, last year at this time, we were at the very beginning of a global pandemic, and the transition to remote work was less than two months old. Though we realized we'd be in the situation for some time, I don't think anyone then would have predicted we'd still be in it more than a year later, and are still unclear as to when it will really end. That said, I continue to be pleased and proud of how our entire global team adapted to conduct business virtually. And we continue to see clients and prospects accelerating their digital transformation initiatives. We expect this acceleration to continue irrespective of when we reach a new normal, whatever that may look like. Our clients recognize that their needs are getting more complex, not less. And as we've proven, we believe we're uniquely positioned to help organizations crush their business complexity. Accordingly, the demand for scalable, low-code solutions can solve the problems of business complexity now and for the future continues to drive our business. Now, most organizations have moved beyond solving the acute needs of the here and now of the pandemic. And we've seen this crisis as a catalyst to get organizations to build stronger businesses for a very different future in 2021 and beyond. No one wants to be caught unprepared when the next crisis hits, whatever that might look like. In response, we continue to focus our efforts on building solutions and an ecosystem to support the evolving needs of our clients. improving efficiency, usability, accessibility, and time to value. For example, since we last spoke, we delivered enhancements for low-code development that enables anyone to deploy powerful apps with just clicks. New features makes it easier and faster for both professional and citizen developers to create seamless apps from any desktop application using an intuitive low-code interface and new authoring enhancements. We've also enhanced our software to add the industry's first capability that uses AI to deliver self-optimizing process automation. Pega Process AI intelligently triages incoming customer requests and other events in near real time and enables fast and efficient event resolutions while helping to lower operating costs and simplify staff and customer experiences. It helps organizations drive greater process efficiency and effectiveness at enterprise scale. We continue to focus on enhancing our enterprise-grade intelligent automation capabilities, leveraging robotics as part of a holistic approach to go beyond incremental improvements and drive true transformation. Intelligent automation needs to do more than simply automate repetitive tasks on a desktop. It needs to be part of a center-out approach, that puts the customer at the center of the business architecture and helps drive customer journeys, or as we call them, micro journeys. This approach brings task automation, process automation, and case management together to create a consistent experience for both customers and employees across all channels, from the front office all the way to the back office, all the way to other clouds. At PegaWorld Inspire next week, on May 4, we'll be showcasing the next major release of Pega Infinity, as well as a reimagined partner program that will provide clients with a deeper portfolio of expertise and also provide our partners additional opportunities to expand their business and drive more revenue. The set of new capabilities in Pega Infinity reflects the ongoing evolution of our underlying architecture, We've made tremendous progress in evolving the runtime architecture to allow for increased service isolation, support of cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes, and the use of leading-edge technologies for caching, search, and data storage. Throughout its history, Pega has provided modern, next-generation solutions. Technological leadership is key, we believe, to accelerating Pega's growth, and we're excited to showcase these advancements next week. I hope you'll join us for this two and a half hour virtual event, which I guarantee will be engaging and informative. You can go to our website to register, or reach out to Ken's office if you need assistance. Now, we've built on our successes from last year to make this year's event even better, with live product demos, interactive Q&As, digital transformation best practices, and success stories, from industry-leading organizations. And PegaWorld is always an opportunity for us and our clients to share client success stories. This year is no exception. For example, Jules Richardson, the new head of personalization at Wells Fargo, will talk about how the bank is using Pega to create a scalable, intuitive solution with powerful AI decisioning at its heart to improve customer engagement and increase conversion rates. Aaron Penny, Portfolio Manager at Pfizer, will share how the company's bold digital transformation efforts, including how they are using Pega to improve accuracy and increase operational efficiency, is helping their drug development process. And Jason Brabrau, Senior Vice President, Head of Customer Retention at SiriusXM, will talk about how the use of Pega Customer Decision Hub for customer retention to identify the right one-on-one experience enables them to balance churn and revenue across 34 million global customers, supported by 10 call centers around the globe. And Edith Din, a technical program manager at Google, will discuss how they're using Paga to automate tedious and manual interactions to optimize research efficiency so they can scale sites, access, and dispatch requests in their data centers. This is a great example of cloud choice as they run their system on the Google Cloud Platform. And much, much more. Now, we're finding more and more opportunities to attract talent with strong, relevant experience and their relationship from peers and competitors, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft. We continue to invest selectively in hiring to build out our senior management bench and our sales capacity. You may recall we brought in Hayden Stafford last year in a new role as President of Global Customer Engagement. Hayden has made and will continue to make additions to the senior leadership team, bringing in talent from high-growth organizations. And I believe these changes create a foundation for accelerated growth and will support a sales and partner ecosystem that will help us worldwide bring our market execution to the next level. We're excited about these investments and the impact we expect they'll have in the second half and beyond. We're also investing more in brand awareness. For example, you may have seen our logo on the clothing of two very promising golfers, Mel Reed and Mark Leishman. And we'll be sponsoring them over the next two years. It was very exciting to see Mark finish in the top five at the Masters and win the Zurich Classic over the last weekend. And we'll have some additional exciting news related to branding coming up in the weeks after Pegaworld. So... In summary, we're executing on a strategy and are optimistic about 2021 and future years. Our transition to a recurring revenue model is continuing apace. We have the right solutions to help our clients address both the short-term and long-term effects of the pandemic while they build for the future, whatever that may bring. And we have the right go-to-market strategy, structure, and team to meet our goals. We'll continue to make necessary investments required to scale while carefully considering margins. And we continue to see significant upside among both our existing clients and new opportunities. To provide more color on the financial results, let me now turn this over to our Chief Operating Officer and CFO, Ken Stilwell. Thanks, Alan.