Roper Technologies, Inc.

Good morning. The Roper Technologies conference call will now begin. Today's call is being recorded, and all participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need operator assistance, please signal conference presence by pressing the star key followed by zero. And now I'd like to turn the conference over to Zach Moxley, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, and thank you all for joining us as we discuss the second quarter financial results for Roper Technologies. Joining me on the call this morning are Neil Hunn, President and Chief Executive Officer, Jason Conley, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Brandon Cross, Vice President and Principal Accounting Officer, and Shannon O'Callaghan, Vice President of Finance. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release announcing our financial results. The press release also includes replay information for today's call. We have prepared slides to accompany today's call, which are available through the webcast and are also available on our website. Now, if you'll please turn to page two. We begin with our safe harbor statement. During the course of today's call, we will make forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties as described on this page in our press release and in our SEC filings. You should listen to today's call in the context of that information. And now please turn to page three. Today, we will discuss our results primarily on an adjusted, non-GAAP, and continuing operations basis. For the second quarter, the difference between our GAAP results and adjusted results consists of the following items. amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets, and the financial impacts associated with our minority investment in Indicor. Reconciliations can be found in our press release and in the appendix of this presentation on our website. And now, if you'll please turn to page four, I will hand the call over to Neil. After our prepared remarks, we will take questions from our telephone participants. Neil?

Thanks, Neil, and thanks to everyone for joining our call. We're looking forward to sharing our second quarter results with you this morning, which, like Q1, were quite good. As we turn to page four, let's look at today's agenda. I'll start with our second quarter enterprise highlights, then ask Jason to share our financial results. After that, we'll turn to our segment-specific discussion and wrap up outlining our increased 2023 enterprise guidance. So let's go ahead and get started. Next slide, please. As we turn to page five, the four main takeaways for today's call are, first, We continue to perform extremely well and had a very strong second quarter, another demonstration of the quality of our portfolio businesses. Second, we're increasing our foliar guidance, both in terms of total and organic revenue growth and adjusted depths. Third, generative AI. We're very excited by the promise of this technology and outline reasons why today. And fourth, we remain very well positioned for disciplined capital deployment. As it relates to the first takeaway, a strong start to the year and a solid second quarter, we saw total revenue grow 17% and organic revenue grow 9%. Consistent with our longstanding strategy, we continue to not only scale our enterprise, but also simultaneously improve its underlying quality and recurring revenue base. Importantly, we had very strong cash flow performance with free cash flow growing 17% in the quarter. Our results this quarter are another proof point that our higher quality, less cyclical portfolio was purpose-built to consistently perform at a very high level. Given the strong second quarter, we're increasing our full-year total revenue growth to be around 13%, increasing our organic revenue growth to be around 7%, and increasing our full-year depth guidance to be in the range of 1636 to $16.50, or up 23 cents at the midpoint versus our previous guidance of $16.10 to $16.30. Third, relative to Gen AI, we feel we're structurally advantaged and excited by this technology, as our vertical and application-specific businesses will use their specialized market positions and knowledge to provide context to these enabling technologies, both to create customer value and internal productivity gains. More on this during today's call. And finally, we continue to be well positioned relative to capital deployment. We remain active in the market as we evaluate and actively diligence many high quality opportunities. Jason, I'll turn the call over to you so you can walk through our second quarter results and our very strong financial position. Jason.

Thanks, Neil. And I hope everyone is doing well this morning. Turning to slide six, the second quarter was another good post in 2023. Revenue came in at $1.53 billion, which was up 17% over prior year. Organic growth was 9%, which was led by 8% software recurring revenue growth across the enterprise, and outsized growth 19% in our tech-enabled product segment. EBITDA increased 20% to $617 million, with EBITDA operating leverage of 46%. Notably, margin expanded across all three segments in the quarter. Depth of $4.12 was $0.12 above the high end of our guidance range and 20% above prior year. Depth growth was in line with EBITDA growth given the offsetting impact of a higher tax rate and lower net interest expense. Moving to free cash flow, as a reminder, the second quarter is always our lowest conversion quarter in the year as we make two federal tax payments. We delivered $295 million of free cash flow in the quarter, which was up 17% over prior year. As I previously mentioned, Frontline's cash flow is seasonally weighted to Q3 and Q4, especially in Q3, and this is in line with their K-12 customers' annual renewals. So, we expect a meaningful increase to cash flow in the second half. Taking a broader view of cash flow on this slide, recall that we acquired VertiFOR in 2020 and had a one-time cash tax benefit of $120 million, of which about $60 million benefited the second quarter of 2021. We've therefore had very strong multi-year cash flow performance when normalizing for this 2021 tax item. For the year, we are confident that free cash flow will be greater than 30% of revenue. Turning to our balance sheet on slide 7, our net leverage sits at 2.2 times at the end of the quarter with about $6.7 billion of debt and just under $1.5 billion of cash against our TTM EBITDA of $2.35 billion. Also, our $3.5 billion revolver remains fully undrawn. To summarize, we have significant acquisition capacity and remain quite active in many bespoke processes. To that end, in Q3, we expect to close on Replicon, which is a bolt-on acquisition for our Dell Tech business with a purchase price of $450 million, or about $370 million net of a long-term cash tax benefit. Neil will discuss the details around this exciting addition to the Dell Tech platform in the segment discussions. So with that, I'll turn it back over to Neil to talk about our segment performance and outlook. Neil?

Thanks, Jason. Let's turn to page nine and walk through our Q2 highlights for our application software segment. Revenues here were $770 million, up 6% on an organic basis, and EBITDA margins increased to 43.7% in the quarter. In this segment, we continue to see consistently strong performance across the entire group of companies. We'll start with Deltas. Deltek was, once again, solid across both their government contracting and private sector businesses. Importantly, Deltek continues to see momentum build with their SaaS offerings and retention rates remain at historically high levels. Also in the quarter, and as Jason mentioned earlier, we announced the acquisition of Replicon for Deltek, Roper's largest bolt-on to date. Replicon is a market-leading timekeeping and workforce management SaaS solution focused on professional services firms, and it's highly complementary to Dell Tech's strategy. We expect Replicon to contribute north of 70 million of revenue and 24 million of EBITDA next year, and we expect the deal to close during the third quarter. Finally, as it relates to Dell Tech, we wanted to brag on them for a moment. During the quarter, The Washington Post awarded Dell Tech the number four top workplace in the DC metro area for large companies. As you know, we have a closely held belief that talent and culture can create long-term competitive advantage, and this is certainly the case for Dell Tech. During Roper's ownership of Dell Tech, the company has increased its organic growth rate, retention levels, recurring revenue, and margin structure And a big contributor to that success is the structural talent advantage that Dell Tech continues to build. Congrats to Mike, and congrats to your entire team. Adderent, our software business focused on the needs of law firms, continues to be excellent. In the quarter, Adderent saw record bookings and continued success in the adoption and cross-sell of their SaaS solutions. Also, and importantly during the quarter, Adderitt launched their generative AI enabler, MADI. Today, MADI is enabling two solutions, outside council guidelines management and time entry, with plans to extend this to AR cash receipt matching and docketing over the coming months. Over time, MADI will be integrated widely across Adderitt's product platforms. Generative AI for a legal space has tremendous potential. One such example in the market today is Onyx. ONIX powered by MADI solves a massive challenge that all law firms face, namely how to navigate outside counsel guidelines or the billing requirements that clients impose on their law firms. It's fairly common for a large law firm to have to navigate hundreds of thousands of bespoke client billing requirements. Today, ONIX uses generative AI to extract contractual terms and convert them into business rules used in the time entry and billing processes, a true game changer. More broadly across Roper, we're excited about the potential of generative AI and large language models. We believe, given our deeply verticalized and application-specific business model, that our businesses are structurally advantaged, given that all AI, computational and generative, need context, specifically data and workflows, in which to train or target the technology. Internally, we're working closely with our businesses on the productivity and product-enabled opportunities associated with Gen AI. Certainly much more to come on this. Now back to the segment performance in VertiFOR, our software business that tech-enables property and casualty insurance agencies. VertiFOR continues to be a great asset for us, with solid performance across their core P&C business and their recent MGA solutions bolt-ons. Our healthcare IT businesses also perform very well in the quarter with growth in each of our healthcare IT franchises, Clinicsys, Data Innovations, and Strata. Frontline also continues to deliver for us. Frontline's mission is to empower the frontline of education. As many of you know, the hiring of teachers and administrative staff is particularly challenging, and Frontline Software Solutions better equip K-12 school districts to navigate these challenges. Because of this, Frontline solutions are mission critical and of high importance to their school district customers. As such, Frontline's net retention is consistently strong. Looking to the second half of the year, we expect to see organic revenue growth to be in the mid single-digit area for the segment. Overall, very strong results in outlook for this segment. Turning to page 10. Revenues in the quarter for a network software segment were $358 million, up 5% on an organic basis, and EBITDA margins were strong at 54.2%. As with our application software segment, growth and performance was solid across the segment. Relative to business-specific comments, we'll start with our U.S. and Canadian freight matching businesses, DAT and LoadLink. both of which grew in the quarter despite continued challenges across the broader freight and logistics markets. I'll remind you that our businesses are critical to the operation and execution of the North American spot freight market. In addition, and importantly, the spot market is a long-term secular beneficiary in terms of the volume of future freight ships. Throughout and across the freight and economic cycle, DAT and LoadLeak continue to innovate and launch new products and offerings to help drive enhanced customer value and share of wallet. As we speak, DAT is launching a generative AI enabled solution among other initiatives targeted to combat freight industry fraud. This is in addition to their existing set of computational AI and data science driven solutions like DAT IQ, which they've deployed at scale over the last three or four years. iPipeline, Our network software business that tech enables the distribution channel for life insurance and annuities had very nice ARR gains in the quarter, driven by strong retention and customer expansion activity. Foundry continued its string of strong performance and had terrific growth for their flagship product, Nuke, which enabled continued double-digit recurring revenue growth. As we mentioned last quarter, Foundry commenced their subscription pricing transition for Nuke and in the first half of the year had north of 60% of their new units sold under their new model ahead of their transition plan. Finally, our alternate site healthcare businesses led by SoftRiders and SHP were strong in the quarter. Execution was solid and the businesses benefited by an improving census and skilled nursing, assisted living facilities, and home health reaching the highest occupancy levels in patient volume since the onset of the pandemic. Turning to the second half of the year, we expect to see mid-single-digit organic growth for the segment based on sustained ARR momentum. As we turn to page 11, revenues in the quarter for a tech-enabled product segment were $403 million, up 19% on an organic basis. EBITDA margins for this segment were strong at 36.4% for the quarter. Across the segment, business performance and execution was exceptional. Importantly, the broad-based supply chain issues continue to ease. Neptune, our water meter and technology product business, continues to be great. In the quarter, they had record revenue performance. Importantly, Neptune continues to see increasing demand and momentum for their residential and commercial ultrasonic or static meters. We remain bullish about Neptune and the market in which they compete. given this market tends to be quite steady as Neptune's customers' budgets are typically fixed year-to-year and not tied to broader macroeconomic trends or cycles. Verathon was awesome in the quarter as well, with double-digit order growth and tremendous operational execution. Specifically, Verathon saw strength across their reoccurring single-use products, both Broncoscope or B-Flex, and Video Innovation or Glidescope, as well as bladder scan capital purchases. Northern Digital, or NDI, was also strong in the quarter, setting a record revenue for the business. A group of smaller businesses here, IPA, RF Ideas, and Enovonix, were fantastic in the quarter as they substantially worked through a series of nagging supply chain challenges. Relative to the second half of the year, we expect to see high single-digit organic revenue growth. Recall, We have a tough Q3 revenue and margin comp to lap from the prior year. Now please turn to page 13 and let's review our increased 2023 guidance. Based on our strong second quarter performance, we're raising our full year 2023 guidance for total revenue, organic revenue, and adjusted depths. For 2023, we now expect total revenue growth to be around 13% and increase from 12% plus last quarter. In addition, we're raising our full-year organic revenue outlook to be in the 7% zip code, an increase from 6% to 7% last quarter, and 5% to 6% in our original guide. As a result of our improved revenue outlook, we're increasing our depth guidance to be in the range of 1636 and 1650, up from our prior guidance of 1610 to 1630. Assumed that this guidance is a tax rate trending to the high end of our 21% to 22% range. Specific to the third quarter, we're establishing our depth guidance to be in the range of 416 and 420. Now please turn with us to page 14 and then we'll look forward to answering your questions. We want to leave you with the same four points with which we started. First, the year started strong and we delivered solid second quarter results. In the quarter, we saw revenues increase 17% to 1.53 billion. This growth was underpinned with 9% organic revenue growth and 8% organic software recurring revenue growth. In addition, EBITDA margins were quite strong at 40.3%. Second, based on the strong second quarter performance, the recurring nature of our revenue stream, and the importance of our solutions to our customers, we're increasing our full-year total and organic revenue growth outlook and increasing our full-year depth outlook to be between 1636% and 1650. Third, we're excited by the potential of janitor of AI, both as it relates to internal productivity and using our application specificity to provide context for new product development ideas. We look forward to sharing progress and updates in coming quarters and years. And finally, we continue to be active with our capital deployment activities as we have north of $4 billion of available M&A firepower. As we've been discussing over the past several months, We have a very large pipeline of opportunities, though, as always, we remain super patient and highly disciplined to ensure the continued optimal deployment of our available capital. Now, as we turn to our questions, and if you'd flip to the final slide or strategic flywheel, we want to once again thank those of you who joined us in New York for our first ever Investor Day and for the hundreds who have watched the replay over the past few months. During that long-form overview of ROPR, We were excited to share with you our long-term strategy, the high-quality nature of our portfolio businesses, our operating ability to improve our businesses, our process-driven capital deployment approach, and our compelling long-term business model that compounds cash flow in the mid-teens area. So thank you for your continued interest in Roper, and with that, let's open it up to your questions.

Yes, thank you. We will now go to our question-and-answer portion of the call. Request that all callers limit their questions to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, you may do so by pressing star, the key followed by the digit 1 on your touch-tone telephone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then the digit 2. Again, if you request that callers limit their questions to one main question and one follow-up. And the first question comes from Julian Mitchell with Barclays.

Hi, good morning. Maybe just the first question around in network software, you had a very strong margin performance up over 200 points of only mid-single digit organic growth. So I just wondered if there was anything driving that perhaps on mix or anything kind of one time. And then Also in that division, how are you thinking about second half growth in DAT and LoadLink versus first half?

Hey, good morning, Julian. It's Jason. So, yeah, I mean, I think we had a strong performance across a lot of the businesses. I think probably the one standout is our ConstructConnect business. We acquired a bolt-on that we closed last year.

and uh we're seeing uh realizing the benefits from that deal and then like i said beyond that it's just across the across the segment and uh roll your second question second half for dat and load link you know our freight match businesses um we continue to be uh cautious there and conservative we've been held that posture the whole year um dat performed very well in the quarter it grew high single digits the um The broker part of the business and the data analytics part of the business remain super solid, high retention rates. But as we all know, the carrier side of the market, the excess carriers are trading out of the market and that has a weighing effect on DAT. So we've modeled that in all year long and it's playing out generally in line with what we thought here in Sarasota. Maybe a touch better, but we'll just say in line with Sarasota's expectations and Relative to the second half for DAT, the big wild card is what happens with yellow and UPS. I mean, so we'll see what happens there. It could be a pickup for the spot market if something were to turn negative on either one or both of those.

That's interesting. Thank you. And then just, you know, as we look at the second half guidance you called out in TEP, the tough comp for third quarter, again, Just one other thing I wanted to check on the back half. It looks like the guidance implies fourth quarter depth doesn't really go up much sequentially in Q4. Historically, you've had often a mid-single-digit type EPS increase in Q4 sequentially. I just wondered if that was just kind of conservatism in the construct for this year or if there's anything specific going on.

Nothing really specific sequentially. I mean, I think, you know, we've talked about a little bit about just, you know, the seasonal shutdown at Neptune. We've had that historically. But I wouldn't point to any conservatism. I mean, we've got sort of networks, you know, still at mid-single digits. So maybe in the prior years you might have seen some acceleration coming into the fourth quarter. But, you know, nothing really unusual there. And what was your first question? Sorry, Julianne.

Oh, no, that was really it, just around if there was anything on the fourth quarter to kind of call out. But it sounds like this year should be fairly typical in terms of seasonality. Correct. Great. Thank you. Yep. Thanks. Thanks, Julian.

Thank you. And the next question comes from Dean Dre with RBC Capital Markets.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Morning. Hey, can we start with just broadly the tone of business? There was a reference in the first quarter, and I think also at the analyst day, that you were seeing some slower customer decision making. But the way I look at this quarter with the upside on the organic side and the outlook, has that improved? And, you know, very specifically, you know, Would you measure that in new logos, in SaaS conversions, but just kind of that tone of business, please?

Yeah, I would characterize it. Our software businesses are playing out about as we expected coming into the year, right, expecting a little bit of a slowdown. So you see delayed decision-making that pushes out net new sales, but it also has the impact of having higher gross retention because decisions are being deferred. And then also just the amount of expansion activities that we have, activity we have with our customers is a little bit less as our customers are just more cautious as they look forward. So that's playing out about as we expected. It's not acute in any one of our businesses. It's just sprinkled across the universe of our portfolio today. Relative to TEP, I mean, it was just fantastic. You know, we had a lot of demand in the medical businesses remained very strong, especially at Verathon and Civco. A lot of supply chain clear up in the first half, especially in the second quarter. And we called out, very rarely do we call out the three small businesses that we did on the slide, but they had just terrific supply chain sort of performance and operational performance in the quarter.

Yeah, that's really good to hear. And just as a follow up, can we talk about the impact AI is having and how you're evaluating M&A candidates? So, you know, is there a eye towards, you know, the barriers to entry? Roper is focused on these deep domain expertise types of, you know, deep vertical So how do you look at where and how AI might be a threat to these? How do you look at the candidates in terms of where and how AI might advance their business model? And just, you know, what has changed there?

Yeah, I think it's certainly a consideration today where, you know, computational AI has been a consideration for a few years. Generative is newer this year. I think the thing that is nice about our portfolio or M&A strategy is it just happens to play into the strength of where generative AI and computational AI is best suited. So more verticalized, more application specific, more intimacy with customers. And so our M&A approach is well suited given the development of these technologies. And as always, you've heard us say this for decades, we're looking in our capital deployment, if there's a zero in the Monte Carlo, if we can envision a doomsday, then we're out. We're just not going to lean into that. So we'll look at, you know, we always look at that. And to the extent we can dream up a zero in the Monte Carlo because of generative or computational AI, then we're not going to consider it in any way. So that's not a new thing for us. Anything to add, Jason?

No, I think that's right. And any sort of content type business, we've always, you know, steered away from, and I think this just accentuates that with the admin of AI, the owner of AI. Thank you.

Thank you. And the next question comes from Robert W. Barron Company.

Great. Hi, everyone. Hey, good morning. If I go back to last quarter, I think you referenced the leadership summit and the business unit presidents coming together. This quarter, there was an announcement about iPipeline and VertiFOR partnering together on product. Is it maybe possible to connect these two things together? So by doing more to share best practices across the operating divisions, can Roper actually uncover incremental product opportunities and maybe offering a broader suite when it comes to certain end markets that are jointly served today?

Yeah, I think there's definitely and demonstrably benefits for getting our leaders together, unequivocally. It's going to be more in sharing best practices, sharing leadership philosophy, sharing failures and what they learn from the failure. It's going to be more about how do you lead, how do you manage, how do you inspire teams for terrific performance. It's going to be less on connection with the product teams because most of our businesses are in independent and disconnected markets and swim lanes. So if there's something that makes sense, we'll certainly do it. If it doesn't make sense, we won't. The good news about this particular iPipeline and Vertifor is it happened organically between the businesses without any push from the center. So you know that's authentic and it's going to drive value for our customers.

Okay. That's helpful. Just on the topic of generative AI, as you say, your businesses, they provide the context that the applications need. So growth retention, if anything, is biased higher in many aspects. How do you think about net retention and just participating in new avenues for growth? So with some of the early products discussed today, does that really strengthen the core or is there separate monetization that can happen?

Oh, no, I think there's definitely monetization that can happen. It'll happen over time. There's no silver bullet in the short run. You know, we play the long game, build for long-term customer value and relationships. But there's just massive amounts of value that can be created by doing things with both computational and generative AI. And our relationship with our customers are such that we're, at least for the last, you know, 20 years, we're able to capture our fair share of the value that's created. So I don't know why that would be any different going forward. And then, as we all know, there's a tremendous amount of value or productivity to capture inside the four walls of our businesses using generative AI as well.

Great. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you. And the next question comes from Allison Poliniak with Wells Fargo.

Hi. Good morning. I saw the announcement with IntelliTrans sort of stepping out and partnering with the product sensor business. Is that something that's just unique to IntelliTrans, or is it something that you're doing to sort of leverage that sort of asset-light business that you have? Just any thoughts there?

No, that's very, very bespoke to IntelliTrans. I mean, there's not an enterprise-wide strategy to do anything like that, nor would we. If there was, we wouldn't push it down. It's antithetical to what Roper's about, so that's very bespoke to IntelliTrans. Gold star for asking a teletrans question, by the way.

You know, it helps when I also cover in transport. And then just on tech-enabled products, you know, that business continues to outperform organically. You mentioned difficult comps in Q3. Is there any more color you can give us to the cadence between Q3 and Q4 to kind of reach that target? And what sort of drove that outperformance this quarter? Thanks.

Yeah, so Alex and Jason, I think it's pretty consistent cadence in terms of the quarters. You know, what I would say is the outperformance in Q3 was really across the board. We had, you know, Neptune continues to execute really well on their backlog. Their daily sales are up over their plan. You know, healthcare is doing really well in terms of procedures. So just executing on a kind of book and ship basis there. And then some of our product businesses had some backlog that finally got cleared. So that really drove the Q3. And then, you know, the second half, like I said, organic growth should be fairly consistent. It's just what we had last year. We had a lot of backlog clear in the third quarter that was very high margin products. So that's sort of the comp issue that we're lapping in the third quarter.

Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And the next question comes from Terry Tillman with Truist.

Yeah, good morning. Can you all hear me, gentlemen?

We can hear you perfect.

All good.

Wonderful. Happy Friday, Neil, Jason, and Zach. Maybe the first question, it's almost technically two questions, but I'm going to call it one and a half questions. Is actually back on Dell Tech, one of your biggest businesses, if not biggest business on the app software side, I'm just curious on the relative health and demand of Somebody earlier asked about macro, but how the government side's performing versus private sector side. And the second part of that first question is, it seems like something with Replicon, and I think you said it's about $70 million, you could have some pretty good revenue synergy opportunities. And how do you think about that $70 million business, you know, kind of unleashing that product into that large Dell Tech installed base? And then I'd follow up.

So we'll call that two questions, but give you grace. But the Deltrac demand that we talked about in prepared remarks or performance was solid across both government contracting and private sector. We were encouraged by the pipeline build in the quarter for Q4 and early 24 in government contracting. There definitely was a little bit of a lull or an air pocket in government contracting relative to the debt ceiling. And so it was nice to see activity get back to normalized or maybe slightly better than normalized activities relative to early pipeline bill. So that was encouraging to see. We've got to see how that plays out for sure. Replicon, you know, we really like this bolt-on. As we said, it's the largest bolt-on we've done at $450 million, $370 million net of the tax benefit. It's time entry without attachment to an ERP. So time only is a highly demanded solution here. in the PS world, it is not sold today in government contracting. And so we have not underwritten into a revenue synergy opportunity. That's not part of the 70 million or the 24 that we talked about, but it is certainly the expectation over time as Delta Tech takes this product into their core market of government contracting.

Got it. And thanks for being generous. Yes, I guess this technically is the third question. Then On the idea of the M&A pipeline, and you talked about you're just kind of, you know, working through opportunities and bespoke situations, et cetera. But compared to like 90 days ago, would you suggest that there's more, you know, it's more actionable on the bolt-ons versus the potential platform deals? Just maybe a temperature gauge on the stock ranking of the two types. Thank you.

Yep. So... It's been an interesting 90 days. So we continue to be active. Our pipeline still skews more towards bolt-ons for sure. More broadly in the market over the last 90 days, we are encouraged by the fact that there are a couple sizable deals, private, that did not happen because the buyer universe rejected the seller's expectation on value. And so we view that as the deal ultimately did not consummate. So we view that as actually an encouraging sign around as an early indicator that valuations are going to pull in to be more normalized with cost of capital. So we're encouraged by that. But still, our pipeline leans into the bolt-on opportunities.

Yeah, I mean, I would say. That's great.

Thank you.

Yeah, PEX is down dramatically year over year. And so there's just a lot of assets that, you know, at some point need to go. And it's been a year and a half now. So we think, you know, it's getting closer.

Thanks. Thank you. And the next question comes from Christopher Glynn with Oppenheimer.

Thanks. Good morning. I wanted to touch on foundry. Curious if there's any risk of any fallout or perturbations from labor strife risk, and also if you could revisit the comments on the transition plan for that.

Sure. So Foundry, for those that aren't familiar with it, it's a business and media entertainment that's used in post-production for a process called compositing, where you take a live-action image and a computer-generated image and push them together in a single scene. So think Game of Thrones. Pretty much every scene in Game of Thrones was composited with Foundry software, as is almost any high-end production or streaming series. So as it turns out, I think this is the first time since 1960 we've had both a writer strike and an actor strike concurrently. So the current production of content is ceased. There's still a very active pipeline of things in post, and so it has no impact currently on Foundry. The current expectation is the strikes will be resolved this year. And if that's the case, then there'll be very little impact Foundry next year as they'll be back in production and sort of catch up. If it extends beyond this year, then yeah, Foundry will likely be negatively impacted to some extent next year. So that's a watch item for us. And your second question, Foundry this year commenced the transition to a subscription pricing model for their core product of Nuke. So this year, you can buy it either as a license or a subscription. As we mentioned, about 60% of the new units were sold on a subscription basis this year. So it's a nice transition ahead of their plan. ARR is growing double digits. And then beginning next year, it'll be 100% subscription opportunity to buy in the license format. So going according to a little bit of a head plan.

Thanks for that. You bet.

Thank you. And the next question comes from Steve Tusa with JP Morgan.

Hey, guys. Good morning. Good morning. You okay? Am I okay? Yeah, okay. You sounded a little froggy there. Okay. No, no, no, no, no. It's just a little bit early. Thanks for the concern. I appreciate it. So just a couple things. Can you just talk about what you expect for third quarter free cash? Maybe just talk about the deferred revenue drag. you guys have had in the first half, what's driving that? And then just what are organic bookings year over year for the software businesses in the second quarter? Thanks.

Yeah, so, you know, as we mentioned before, the front line's a new dynamic, right, for Roper, where all of the renewals happen in the third quarter. So we're already tracking really strong, just, you know, month to date, if you will, for the renewals there. And they actually consumed cash in the first half, just to give you a perspective on that. Also, I think we historically have very strong second-half seasonality, so that plus just some of the timing of working capital in the second quarter points to a much better second half. First half, we usually pay out incentives. This year, we had that legal settlement, so that even points to that seasonal change for this year. We're still on track to deliver north of 30% of pre-cash flow to revenue. And then you asked about the trends on – so we kind of look at enterprise software bookings, and it was up sequentially a bit and up year over year, not quite as strong as the first quarter, maybe like low singles area, which is about in line with what we – it's obviously embedded in sort of our slowdown for the second half for new activity.

Great. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Yep.

Thank you. And the next question comes from Brent Thill with Jefferies.

Hey, good morning, guys. This is Dave. Good morning. Appreciate you taking some questions. Maybe just on the AI theme, you know, appreciate some of the color that you guys gave. What was curious is, is there some sort of, you know, AI playbook that you guys are laying out for the portfolio companies to be thinking through? Just curious how you're approaching that across the portfolio and appreciate some of those, you know, one-off case studies.

Yeah, so playbook, I would say no. Accelerated education across multiple fronts, yes. So what is it? What's the art of the possible? What are the risks? What are the IP ownership issues? How do you get productivity with an R&D? How do you get marketing lead productivity, marketing content productivity, customer service productivity? We're doing a series of teach-ins and learnings. that is highly subscribed by our, by our businesses. And so that's how we're sort of accelerating the learning across the enterprise.

Got it. That's helpful. And then, you know, maybe we wanted to just ask about, you guys often talk about the portfolio being, you know, mostly macro insulated. You know, I think the macro hasn't been as bad as many have feared, but, As you guys kind of think through that, have there been any companies that, as things have softened a little bit, that maybe have stuck out and maybe were a little surprising where you thought, hey, maybe these were a little bit more macro-immune than they've been showing up to be?

I'm looking at Jason. I think, to our surprise, no. I mean, obviously the one that gets a lot of attention is our DAT business, which grew. It's just truly exceptional the last couple of years, and then this year it's moderated. It's still growing. and we talked about that quite a bit last quarter. So really nothing. I mean, Neptune is solid. As we said in the prepared remarks, their customers' budgets tend to be very fixed year to year and not tied to housing starts, which some people think is the case, but it generally is not. Jason, anything? I don't think so. There's really nothing surprising on the cyclical piece. Yeah, I mean, as Shannon just pointed out, maybe there was a little bit around government contracting, as I mentioned earlier, on the debt ceiling. It's not a macro point per se, but that's now clear at Dell Tech. Understood.

Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.

Thanks. Thank you. And the next question comes from Joe Ritchie with Goldman Sachs.

Thanks. Good morning, guys. Good morning. Good morning. Hey, so maybe just to round out that free cash flow margin point going forward now that the seasonality has maybe changed a little bit. Should we think about then like the second quarter as being, you know, kind of like a free cash flow margin around 20% going forward as you kind of think about, you know, modeling that business?

I mean, it's going to be lower. I'm not sure if I point to a specific margin for every year, but we do make two federal tax payments, so that obviously just drags on the second quarter. So it's always going to be lower than the full year. So that's how I would model it.

Okay. All right, great. That's helpful. And then I guess lastly, you know, we talked a little bit about technology-enabled products and the growth this quarter, tougher comps going forward. I'm just curious, is there a way to potentially quantify the supply chain, you know, easing impact that occurred this quarter? And then is that going to continue? I guess, is that part of the headwind then, potentially, as you kind of, as you think about the second half of the year?

That might be hard. We might have to, I mean, mid-single digit growth is normal for that segment. Then we've got to parse how much might be strength at Verathon and Civco that might be a little bit recurring on top of that, but then the balance maybe, and then the balance would be the supply chain sort of pull and release. Okay.

We can always follow up offline. Thank you, guys. You bet. Thanks, Joe.

Thank you. And this concludes our question and answer session. We'll now return back to Zach Moxley for any closing remarks.

Thanks everyone for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with you during our next earnings call.

Thank you. The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. May now disconnect.