Research Solutions, Inc

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Research Solutions' financial and operating results for its fiscal first quarter ended September 30th, 2021. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, John Beisler, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Research Solutions' first quarter fiscal 2022 earnings call. On the call today are Roy W. Olivier, President and Chief Executive Officer of and Bill Northern, Chief Financial Officer. After the market closed this afternoon, the company issued a press release announcing its results for the first quarter of fiscal 2022. The release is available on the company's website at researchsolutions.com. Before Roy and Bill begin their prepared remarks, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made today will be forward-looking and are made under the Private Securities Litigation Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied due to a variety of factors. We refer you to Research Solutions' recent filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact the company's future operating results and financial condition. Also on today's call, management will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe provide useful information for investors. Reconciliation of those measures to GAAP measures is included in the earnings press release issued this afternoon. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this call will be recorded and made available for replay by a link on the company's website. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Roy.

Thank you, John, and thanks to everyone joining us for our first quarter fiscal 2022 results. I'm also excited to introduce Bill Nerthen, who joined us in October. Bill has 20-plus years in corporate finance, including multiple CFO roles, and Bill and I worked together at ARI Network Services for six years. I'm confident that Bill can help us improve the business in many ways. Our first quarter results reflect the continued momentum in SaaS platform revenues. Overall, we met or exceeded our platform revenue targets regarding new customer platform deployments, platform upsells, and from existing transaction customers. We fell short of our transaction revenue targets, which I'll explain in a little more detail later in the call. On a trailing 12-month basis, we added 158 net new platforms up from 112 trailing 12-month platforms sold as of 9-30-2020. Net new deployments for the quarter were slightly above last year's and were consistent with our expectation as Q1 and Q2 are typically slower than Q3 and Q4. Transaction sales were below expectation for the quarter. Overall, transactions, including platform and not platform, is growing, but the percentage of those transactions generating revenue declined for the quarter year over year. That decline is primarily due to churn within the non-platform customers. Looking at the total average number of monthly transactions in a calendar year or in 2020 and in year to date 2021, corporate and academic platform customers grew total transaction volume or count by 14% year over year. In that same period, those customers grew transactional revenue 6% year over year. So in short, total transaction usage by platform customers is growing, but revenue is not growing at the same rate because more customers are acquiring articles via non-billable sources like open access, subscriptions, tokens, or reuse rights. We expect to see continued volatility with transaction revenues going forward. The good news is that the platform customers are seeing high returns on their investment as our platform helps them maximize the percentage of articles they can acquire at low or no cost, which has kept our platform rates very low, our platform churn rates, I'm sorry, very low. I'll have a few more comments on that later in the call. Overall, the first quarter of fiscal 2021, other than transaction revenue, was a good start to the year and in line with our expectations. After Bill provides a bit more detail, I'll be back to discuss what investments we're making this year to accelerate future revenue growth, which are reflected in the first quarter's results, particularly in our EBITDA. For now, I'll pass the call over to Bill to walk through our fiscal quarter results in a bit more detail.