Altigen Communs Inc

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for your patience. Your conference will begin shortly. Once again, thank you for your patience. The conference will begin shortly. Thank you. Good day everyone and welcome to the Altogen Communications first quarter fiscal year 2024 results. At this time all participants have been placed on a listen only mode and we will open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Carolyn David. Ma'am, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Matthew. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Oxygen Technologies' earnings call for the first quarter fiscal 2024. Joining me on the call today is Jerry Fleming, President and Chief Executive Officer, Jill Hamlin, Chief Digital and Transformation Officer, and I'm Carolyn David, Vice President of Finance. Before we get started, I'm sure you may have seen our press release announcing our new name change. Altogen Communications has rebranded as Altogen Technologies. The strategic name change signifies the company's evolution from a communications software developer to a leading innovator of next generation customer experience solutions and services. The company's legal name and stock ticker symbol ATGN remain unchanged. Earlier this afternoon, we issued an earnings release reporting financial results for the period ended December 31st, 2023. This release can be found on our IR website at www.altogen.com. We have also arranged a tape replay of this call, which may be accessed by phone. The replay will be available approximately one hour after the call's completion and remain in effect for 90 days. The call can also be accessed from the investor relations section of our website. Before we begin our formal remarks, we need to remind everyone that today's call may contain forward-looking information regarding future events and future financial performance of the company. We wish to caution you that such statements are just predictions and actual results may differ materially due to certain risks and uncertainties that pertain to our business. We refer you to the financial disclosures filed periodically by the company with the OTCQB over-the-counter market, specifically the company's audited annual report for the fiscal year ended September 30th, 2023. as well as the safe harbor statement in the press release the company issued today. These documents contain important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the company's projections or forward-looking statements. Altogen assumes no obligation to revise any forward-looking information contained in today's call. In addition, during today's call, we will also be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures are not superior to or a replacement for the comparable GAAP measures, but we believe these measures help investors gain a more complete understanding of results. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures and additional disclosures regarding these measures are included in today's press release. Now, let me turn the call over to Jerry Fleming for opening remarks. Jerry?

Thanks, Carolyn, and hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us for today's call. I'll start the call today with a brief review of our fiscal first quarter results, followed by a more detailed business update. I'll then turn the call over to Joe Hamblin, our new Chief Digital and Transformation Officer, to provide more color on our execution strategies. Following Joe's commentary, Carolyn will provide a detailed review of our first quarter 24 financial results. Earlier today, we reported revenue of $3.2 million in fiscal Q1, resulting in a gap net loss of $346,000 compared to a non-gap net loss of $156,000. These financial results, particularly on the expense side, were impacted by a number of factors, including investments in new internal systems, organizational realignment, and some minor delays in product availability. Those issues are now largely behind us, although I do expect some spillover in the current quarter. After that, I'm anticipating a return to profitability with a target of being both cash flow positive and profitable for the full fiscal year. With that, I'll provide an update on the state of the business. Starting with our services business, revenues were down quarter over quarter, primarily due to a transition to new leadership in our services division, which resulted in both an increase in expenses and lower than anticipated billings. The expense increase was primarily due to the hiring of a new director of technology consulting, Sherik Shaikh, who comes to us via Sprint T-Mobile, where he ran a very large services organization. On a positive note, the increased expenses are behind us. Just as importantly, our monthly billings are now on the increase, as we are experiencing the impact of the new contract we signed with the Connecticut Department of Transportation, or CTDOT. That contract is for $12 million over five years. However, there's also an additional $6 million in funding, which comes from previously contracted but unused funds, plus a new federal grant. In actuality, the total funding available to us for CTDOT projects is more than $18 million over the next five years. Outside of CTDOT, we're also picking up the pace in terms of expanding our services offerings and adding new customer logos. To date, most of our services revenue has been based on custom development services. We're now extending our services offerings to include cloud technology consulting, Microsoft Teams migration services, and AI consulting services, which will be delivered in conjunction with our new AI solutions. These services add value to and are much more synergistic with our cloud software solutions. Turning to the cloud software solutions, during the quarter, we made the decision to merge the capabilities of Core Interact with our front-stage contact center in order to provide an entry-level contact center solution, which we call front-stage core. The primary reason for merging the products is that customers were requesting more and more contact center features to be incorporated into Core Interact to the point that there was becoming too much overlap between the products. By merging the capabilities of Core Interact with Front Stage, we now have a single CCaaS platform, Contact Center as a Service, which is natively integrated with Microsoft Teams that is able to meet the entire spectrum of customer requirements from simple to sophisticated. In addition, this also frees up development resources that can now be redeployed for our new AI solutions. Finally, we are in the process of both migrating the core NREC customers and targeting new opportunities with the front-stage core application. Regarding our MaxCloud UC UCaaS platform, we've been dealing with several constraining issues, not the least of which has been to meet Fiserv's stringent security standards for solutions that are deployed in their data centers. That objective has now been met, with Fiserv planning to start their customer migrations to Mac UC in April. Looking ahead to our new AI solutions, we've been working on a number of innovative applications, all targeting, at least initially, the financial services vertical market. We started on these new AI-based fintech solutions by extending our interactive voice response, or IVR solution, to become a complete customer self-service platform. Toward this end, we're incorporating into the platform conversational AI, which is based on Microsoft Azure OpenAI services. This capability enables customers to use natural language speech to perform a multitude of transactions on a 24 by 7 basis without the need to engage a live customer service agent. This will be a new fee-based solution offered by Fiserv to their 1,500 bank and credit union customers using the Altogen IVR. We expect a solution which is easily cost-justified by improved customer service and cost savings associated with eliminating the need for human intervention to be launched early next quarter. We also have several new and exciting AI solutions in our development pipelines. Targeting those same 1500 banks and credit unions using the Altogen IVR will initially deliver a first-of-its-kind AI executive dashboard, which we're calling Core Analytics IVR. Current IVR analytics solutions only report on call-based transactional or usage statistics. Core Analytics adds caller-specific demographic data, which we are able to uniquely access via our integrations with the Fiserv core processing platforms. With Core Analytics IVR, banks and credit union executives will have a real-time view of transactional data, which will correlate with customer demographic data, which will then display not only transactions performed, but more importantly, which customers are performing those transactions. This unique view provides business executives with previously unavailable actionable insights, which are used to customize the IVR options, selections, and offers presented to each unique caller based on their customer demographic information. As a result, Core Analytics will enable financial institutions to optimize their customer service capabilities by delivering a personalized experience to each and every customer. We're also working on a version of Core Analytics for Contact Centers, which provides analytics when customers interact with a live customer service agent. Core Analytics CCE, stands for Contact Center Edition, will correlate traditional contact center KPI data with caller-specific demographic data to provide unique insights into individual customer transactions. It will also use AI to monitor the conversations and provide valuable insights showing customer intent, sentiment of the call, call quality, and even score the agent's interaction with the customer, thus providing a 360-degree view of every customer interaction. Finally, we're also actively working on the introduction of a web-based conversational AI solution using intelligent chatbot technology. Delivered as a managed service will first deploy knowledge bases specifically tailored to an individual bank or credit union's requirements. The solution, called Core AI, will then process customer chats using AI to appropriately respond, essentially functioning as a 24 by 7 virtual customer service agent, again, increasing customer service while reducing the cost of servicing those customers. As I mentioned, our AI solutions will initially be targeting the financial services vertical where we have the greatest expertise. While we will be offering these solutions through Fiserv, we'll also be directly providing the core AI solution to customers as part of the managed AI service. By the way, for those of you not familiar with Fiserv, at $17 billion in revenue, they are the world's largest financial services solutions provider. They currently white-label Altogen's UCaaS, CCaaS, and IVR solutions, along with our secure SIP fraud prevention service. Adding Altogen's AI solutions to the mix provides Fiserv with a comprehensive and much larger portfolio of customer engagement solutions than they have ever had from Altogen. With Fiserv having over 5,000 bank and credit union customers, the AI business opportunity is nothing short of massive. That concludes my initial review. At this time, I'll hand the call over to Joe for additional commentary.