Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the ANSYS first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. With us today are Ajei Gopal, President and Chief Executive Officer, Nicole Anasenes, Chief Financial Officer, and Alex Di Ruzza, Investor Relations Manager. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal our 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 from the question queue, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Di Ruzza for opening remarks. Please go ahead. Good morning, everyone. Our earnings release, the related prepared remarks document, and the link to our first quarter 2023 Form 10-Q have all been posted on the homepage of our investor relations website. They contain the key financial information and supporting data relative to our first quarter financial results and business update, as well as our Q2 and fiscal year 2023 outlook, and the key underlying quantitative and qualitative assumptions. Today's presentation contains forward-looking information. Important factors that may affect our future results are discussed in our public filings. Forward-looking statements are based upon our view of the business as of today. ANSYS undertakes no obligations to update any such information. During this call, we will be referring to non-GAAP financial measures, unless otherwise stated. A discussion of the various items that are excluded and the reconciliations of GAAP to the comparable non-GAAP financial measures are included in our earnings release materials. I would now like to turn the call over to our President and CEO, Ajei Gopal, for his opening remarks. Ajei. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Q1 was an outstanding quarter for ANSYS, with the company once again surpassing expectations across all key metrics. We grew ACV by 19% in constant currency over Q1 2022, which reflects the power of our world-class products, the ongoing demand from our customers, and the strength of our business. As a result of our strong Q1, we have operationally raised our full year guidance for ACV, revenue, and EPS. Nicole will have the details in a few minutes. ANSYS realized broad-based growth across the business in Q1. We grew revenue by double digits in every region in the quarter, with the Americas leading the way. From a vertical perspective, the high-tech and semiconductor, aerospace and defense, and automotive and ground transportation sectors were again our top contributors. Our largest agreement in the quarter was a nearly $74 million three-year contract with a multinational aerospace and defense technology company based in the U.S. We grew the account by showcasing the value ANSYS has driven at this long-time customer, including a new workflow with our Digital Mission Engineering and electromagnetic solutions that reduce the time required to bring a critical product to market by 50%. That same workflow is being reused by multiple groups within the company, helping to drive more users, more products, and more computations. On these calls, I often highlight a specific aspect of our business. Over the past several quarters, I have discussed the critical role that ANSYS solutions play in sustainability. I highlighted how customers are using our solutions in the development of next generation semiconductors, I reviewed our leading suite of optical simulation products. For this call, I would like to give you additional insight into the innovation we are driving across our multi-physics portfolio through an easy to understand taxonomy of five technology pillars. Our investments in these pillars are applicable across our portfolio and demonstrate how we are building upon our product and technology leadership to further differentiate our solutions. Even more exciting is the interplay amongst these pillars, which is benefiting customers by helping them to solve more complex challenges while driving our growth through more products, more users, and more computations. As you know, ANSYS is a leader in advanced numerical simulation methods that accurately predict the multi-physics behavior of engineered products. Our continued investment across our core multi-physics products is reflected in our first technology pillar, which is numerics. Accurately predicting physical phenomena in the real world is intrinsically complicated. The numerics pillar encompasses the latest advances in science, mathematics, and analytics, which help us gain a deeper understanding of the physical world. It is the essence of what we do at ANSYS with our core products. Over the last several releases, we have further differentiated our products with advanced numerics capabilities. Let me give you just a few examples. In ANSYS Mechanical, new functionality enables customers to automatically predict structural crack initiation and growth without the need for expert knowledge. In ANSYS HFSS, our leading electromagnetic solution, users can now solve increasingly complicated problems by creating simulations eight times larger than before. In CFD, our fluids blade row analysis enables customers to automatically mesh complex blade features while retaining the efficient hex meshes that turbomachinery engineers demand. In Q1, we signed a new contract with longtime customer IHI, which uses advanced numerics capabilities from ANSYS to develop engines that run on a broad range of energy sources, including hydrogen and biomethane. IHI is expanding its usage of ANSYS multi-physics solutions, including structures and fluids, to accelerate time to market and to increase engine efficiency and performance. Our second technology pillar is high-performance computing, or HPC, which is enabling customers to solve problems they couldn't solve otherwise and to do so faster than anyone thought possible. ANSYS has close partnerships with hyperscale computer partners and has long taken advantage of distributed memory, multiprocessing, and multiple cores to accelerate our customers' products to market, and in the process, drive more computations. Again, I could cite numerous examples of new HPC technologies in our solutions, but in the interest of time, here are just a few. In ANSYS Mechanical, technologies such as hybrid parallel, which blends distributed and shared memory parallel programming techniques, enables simulations to scale to tens of thousands of compute cores. A new multi-GPU solver empowers users to run ANSYS Fluent natively on multiple GPUs. This CFD solution, which we believe is the first general-purpose CFD solver for GPUs, is seven times less expensive than hardware purchase costs and consumes four times less power than an equivalent CPU solution. In Q1, we signed a contract with the international technology group, ANDRITZ, which offers a broad portfolio of innovative power plants, equipment, systems, services, and digital solutions for a wide range of industries and end markets. As part of this agreement, ANDRITZ is leveraging HPC to more rapidly solve complex structural and fluid simulations to increase the efficiency of its turbines. As a result, ANDRITZ is reducing the amount of physical testing needed to deliver its products to market. The next area of technology emphasis is artificial intelligence and machine learning. AI is not restricted to a specific ANSYS product line. Instead, it is architected across our portfolio to improve ease of use, to accelerate time to solve, and to further democratize simulation. Let me start with our use of AI to accelerate the time required to complete a simulation. You might recall that a single large complex simulation can run for days across hundreds of cores. We are incorporating AI techniques directly into multiple products to increase the speed and scale of a single simulation. For example, our real-time radar functionality in ANSYS HFSS is being used to train machine learning algorithms for radar systems in cluttered environments with moving targets. Combining synthetic radar responses with machine learning has resulted in a 1,000 times speed up compared to previous methods, and has opened the door to exciting new opportunities for automotive radar and autonomy. Artificial intelligence can also address the multiple iterative simulations needed to get to an optimal design point. Often, customers use ANSYS products to run complex multivariate optimizations, where they vary design parameters and boundary conditions over multiple simulation runs to reach the best design. Such multiple iterative runs can be time-consuming due to the number of simulations that need to be performed. To address this issue, our optimization engine, ANSYS optiSLang, uses AI techniques to reduce the time it takes to iteratively run thousands of simulations for products across the ANSYS portfolio. For example, one customer designing electric motors initially needed seven hours to run an ANSYS Motor-CAD multivariate optimization with 4,800 simulations. With the AI techniques in ANSYS optiSLang, they solved the same problem in an astonishing 17 minutes. Our fourth technology pillar is cloud and experience. We have made some recent announcements about our cloud marketplace offerings, and we are continuing to invest in cloud-native capabilities as well as user experience. ANSYS offers two distinct kinds of cloud offerings. The first is cloud marketplace, and the second is cloud-native. This combination of marketplace and native takes full advantage of past innovations as well as some of our newly announced cloud capabilities. The marketplace offerings deliver flexibility to our customers by taking advantage of familiar ANSYS products while leveraging the benefit of cloud computing and their own pre-existing relationships with cloud service providers. ANSYS has announced partnerships with key cloud providers, AWS and Microsoft Azure. In quick Q1, a developer of sustainability technologies for buildings and electric vehicles began using ANSYS Maxwell on the cloud, thanks to ANSYS Gateway powered by AWS. Using this cloud-powered solution, the customer is optimizing the electromagnetics of its smart motor design via cloud bursting on several independent workstations. Users can spin up a cluster in minutes and add remote users from satellite locations to improve overall agility and speed proof of concept. The company's engineers are simultaneously running 125,000 simulations and analyzing designs seven times faster thanks to the solution. On the cloud-native space, we are targeting new users and new use cases with a cloud-based platform for the development and deployment of new workflows and applications. While cloud-native simulation is still early in the maturity cycle, we are continuing to advance this exciting technology. The final technology pillar empowers customers to optimize product designs to meet physical and behavioral requirements throughout the engineering design life cycle, thanks to digital engineering. Digital engineering relates to a set of connected, federated, and interoperable technologies that enable the collaborative execution of engineering tasks. Today, the vast majority of time and money spent on R&D goes towards failure mode avoidance. Digital engineering enables a more rigorous R&D process based on model-based engineering, system-level simulation, and an agile iterative methodology that results in improved product quality and faster throughput with reduced costs. The latest release of ANSYS Minerva improves engineering productivity with efficient simulation process and data management, while connecting powerful simulation and optimization solutions to an existing ecosystem of tools and processes. ANSYS SCADE users can employ Model-Based Systems Engineering methods to design and generate reliable embedded software. As you might expect, this pillar is driving more users and more products. In Q1, we signed an agreement with a global automotive OEM that is expanding its use of ANSYS products to include additional Electronics and Model-based System Engineering technologies. By taking advantage of these solutions, the automaker can import architecture from existing models, allowing for reuse and traceability of parts. The automaker has reported that the use of ANSYS simulations has decreased product development time by months, which is helping the company to keep pace with increasing customer demands. Our investments across these five technology pillars: numerics, HPC, AI/ML, cloud computing, and digital engineering, are critical for our ongoing successes. Even more important is the interplay amongst them, which is fueling ANSYS's growth and widening our product leadership across the board. Our customers across industries are benefiting from many of these advances today, which is helping them to deliver their own innovations to market. Moving to our partner ecosystem, we recently announced a collaboration with Synopsys and Keysight Technologies, in which we developed a radio frequency design reference flow for TSMC's 16 nm FinFET compact technology. TSMC's technology is critical for advanced autonomous systems, including automotive radar, 5G connectivity, security applications, and environmental monitors. We also recently announced that ANSYS is expanding our university partnerships to train the next generation of engineers through a funded curriculum program. We are financially supporting educators to help them develop undergraduate engineering curricula at universities around the world. ANSYS is already being taught at more than 3,000 universities across nearly 90 countries, and there have been more than 2.75 million downloads of our free student product. In Q1, we published the updated version of our corporate responsibility report. In it, we discussed the progress we have made against our ESG goals. Additionally, ANSYS has developed a focused strategy to support our customers' sustainability objectives with a particular emphasis on clean environment, materials and circularity, energy solutions, and manufacturing and operational efficiency. Finally, I'm excited to announce that ANSYS has again been certified as a Most Loved Workplace. This certification recognizes great workplaces based on employee surveys that gauge levels of respect, collaboration, support, and a sense of belonging. In summary, Q1 was an outstanding quarter that has set the stage for the rest of 2023. As we have demonstrated by again beating guidance across all key metrics, our end markets remain robust, and our business has proven its resilience despite some economic uncertainties. Customers understand our compelling value proposition, which is driving their top-line growth and delivering bottom-line savings. Our continued momentum, the strong customer relationships we have consistently demonstrated, and our ongoing investments in technology will propel us through 2023 and beyond. As a result, we are more confident than ever in our ability to achieve future milestones. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Nicole. Nicole? Thank you, Ajei. Good morning, everyone. Let me take a few minutes to add some perspective on our first quarter financial performance and provide context for our outlook and assumptions for Q2 and 2023. The first quarter demonstrated the strength of our business as we delivered robust growth during Q1 and beat our financial guidance across all key metrics. ACV exceeded expectations and beat the high end of our Q1 guidance in constant currency. Revenue, operating margin, and EPS also exceeded the high end of our guidance. Given the strength of demand for simulation and the momentum we see in our pipeline, we are operationally raising our full year ACV, revenue, and EPS. Operational improvements in our full year ACV outlook is above and beyond our Q1 outperformance. I'll provide additional details on our guidance in a few minutes. Now let me discuss some of our Q1 financial highlights. Beginning with ACV, we delivered $399.4 million in Q1, which grew 16% year-over-year or 19% in constant currency. As Ajei mentioned, our growth was broad-based in the quarter, with growth seen across geographic regions, customer types, and industries. Our wide-ranging growth is evidence of the essential nature of our market leading simulation portfolio. ACV from recurring sources grew 12% or 18% in constant currency year-over-year on a trailing 12-month basis and represented 82% of the total. This momentum in recurring ACV growth is driven by the strong annuity created by our ongoing shift to subscription leases. Q1 total revenue was $509.4 million and grew 19% or 22% in constant currency, which as I mentioned, exceeded the high end of our guidance, driven by the favorable mix of license types in the quarter. All geographic regions grew double digits and contributed to revenue growth, with the Americas leading the way. We had strong top-line performance in Q1 with ACV and revenue both growing double digit in constant currency at 19% and 22% respectively. During the quarter, we delivered growth in excess of our model of double-digit growth, including tuck-in M&A. We closed the quarter with a total balance of GAAP deferred revenue and backlog of $1.4 billion, which grew 13% year-over-year. During the quarter, we continued to manage our business with financial discipline. This yielded a solid first quarter gross margin of 91.2% and an operating margin of 39.8%, which was better than our guidance. Operating margin was positively impacted by outperforming on revenue, the favorable mix of license types, as well as the timing of investments. The result was first quarter EPS of $1.85, which was also better than our guidance. Similar to operating margin, EPS benefited from strong revenue results and the timing of investments. Our effective tax rate in the first quarter was 17.5%, which is the rate that we expect for the remainder of 2023. Our unlevered operating cash flows in the first quarter totaled $269.5 million and grew 26.5% year-over-year, which benefited from strong collections. We ended the quarter with $507.9 million of cash and short-term investments on the balance sheet. In line with our capital allocation priorities, we repurchased approximately 650,000 shares during the quarter for around $196.5 million. We have 1.1 million shares available for repurchase under the current authorized share repurchase program. Let me turn to the topic of guidance. We delivered an outstanding first quarter coming off an exceptional Q4 2022, our updated 2023 forecast reflects the continued broad-based customer demand for our market-leading simulation portfolio. Looking to the remainder of the year, the pipeline of business has improved and continues to show momentum, which bolsters our confidence in achieving our 2023 and long-term outlook. Offsetting our improved full year outlook is further strengthening of the U.S. dollar against certain currencies, particularly the Japanese yen and Korean won, relative to the exchange rates that were embedded in the outlook we provided in February. Notwithstanding the negative impact of exchange rates, our underlying business continues to demonstrate considerable momentum. Let me start with our full year 2023 guidance. We expect our full year ACV outlook to be in the range of $2.265 billion-$2.335 billion, which represents growth of 11.5%-14.9% or 10.8%-14.2% in constant currency. We are raising the midpoint of our ACV guidance in constant currency growth by approximately 1 point. That constant currency increase is driven by robust demand and translates to an operational increase of $16 million relative to our February guidance. Our improved outlook is in excess of the Q1 overperformance we delivered relative to our Q1 guidance. This operational momentum was fully offset by $16 million of foreign exchange headwind. We expect revenue to be in the range of $2.242 billion-$2.322 billion, which is growth of 8.2%-12% or 7.7%-11.6% in constant currency. We are raising the midpoint of our revenue guidance in constant currency growth. Relative to our February guidance, our full year revenue increased $15 million from operational performance, which was fully offset by $15 million of foreign exchange headwind. We expect our full year EPS to be in the range of $8.39- $8.91, which represents an increase of $0.05 at the midpoint. Relative to our February guidance, our full year EPS increased by about $0.18 from better operational performance, lower share count, and higher interest income estimates, which was partially offset by absorbing $0.13 of foreign exchange headwind. Let me turn to our full year unlevered operating cash flow guidance. We now provide guidance for unlevered operating cash flow as it aligns to the long-term cumulative $3 billion cash flow outlook we provided at our 2022 investor update in August. Our 2023 guidance is a range of $699 million-$749 million. Relative to our February guidance, our full year unlevered operating cash flow guidance is adversely impacted by $11 million of foreign exchange headwind. The underlying operating leverage in our business remains robust. Despite the foreign exchange headwinds that have emerged since our February guidance, our current outlook of 8%-16% unlevered operating cash flow growth, building off 16% growth in 2022, demonstrates cumulative cash flow which exceeds ACV growth. Further details on the reconciliation of GAAP operating cash flow to the comparable non-GAAP unlevered operating cash flow are contained in our prepared remarks document. Let me turn to guidance for Q2. For the second quarter, we expect ACV in the range of $474 million-$494 million. Seasonal skew of our renewal base that is unique to 2023 is driving a relatively more muted Q2 dynamic. As I've mentioned in the past, quarterly dynamics can be volatile. For the first half of 2023, we expect to deliver strong double-digit growth. Our full year ACV outlook implies growth above our model in the second half of 2023 and is supported by a robust pipeline and a strong base of renewals that underpin that ACV growth. The first half, second half dynamics embedded in our guidance are playing out as we expected when we initiated guidance in February. Turning to the P&L, we expect Q2 revenue in the range of $473 million-$498 million. We expect Q2 operating margin in the range of 31.9%-34.1% and EPS in the range of $1.35-$1.53. Further details around specific currency rates and other assumptions that have been factored into our outlook for 2023 and Q2 are contained in the prepared remarks document. We have a strong forecast, a highly recurring business model with three vectors of growth, and a healthy backlog in pipeline, all of which contributed to our confidence in our outlook and the underlying momentum of our business. This is reflected in the operationally increased outlook for ACV revenue and EPS. I would like to thank the entire ANSYS team for their outstanding execution in the first quarter, which drove robust financial performance and a strong start to 2023. We once again delivered a strong quarter, which coupled with the improvements in our sales forecast, demonstrate the strength and resilience of the ANSYS business. I remain confident in our ability to deliver our 2023 and long-term outlook. Operator, we will now open the phone lines to take questions. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw from the question queue, please press star then two. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. The first question is from Jay Vleeschhouwer with Griffin Securities. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good morning. Ajei, let me start first with your comments regarding multi-solution sales. You've on occasion given a statistic as to the contribution of the number of those transactions. Within that, are there any notable mixed trends that you're seeing with regard to the contribution of various types of solvers. For example, is CFD growing in particular industries relative to prior mix, or Electronics perhaps within certain industries becoming as material as structural or CFD or other? I think if you could comment on some of those solver mix trends, I think that would be interesting on a per industry basis. My follow-up question is with regard to your comment on the partner ecosystem. If you could speak more broadly about that. Within engineering software, ANSYS has an unusual number of such relationships, so it'd be very interesting to hear if you could comment on the materiality individually or collectively of those relationships. How you think about that ecosystem relative to guidance in terms of your relationships with companies like Synopsys, Cadence, et cetera. Thank you. Jay, to answer... there were a lot of questions embedded in there, let me try to do some justice to a couple of them, perhaps. When you think about the large sales, customers who have purchased more than $1 million or so in the quarter, I would say over 90% have three or more physics and purchase three or more physics from ANSYS. That gives you some perspective of the strength of the multi-physics capabilities that we are able to bring to bear. As far as our products are concerned, obviously, the strength of our flagship products is legendary. I mean, everybody understands, that we have a terrific product in the space. What we've also seen is the interplay between products, and the multi-physics nature of the portfolio, I think, coming through. That's also been really helpful. And, and obviously, the advances that we've made that I've talked about in electromagnetics and CFD and structures, et cetera, across the portfolio in optics. All of those advances, we've made across those five vectors of technology that I talked about are all helpful, and important in the way that we engage with our customers and in the value that they see from our products. I'm feeling very good about our product portfolio. I'm feeling very good about our multi-physics strategy, and our ability to service our customers. With respect to our partnership ecosystem, maybe it's best to step back and talk a little bit about the philosophy. Look, we believe in an open ecosystem. I think it's very important for us, for our customers, to recognize that the vendors that they're working with are participating in an open ecosystem, which means that, which means providing APIs, which means providing for interoperability and things of that nature. We are, we are committed to that. We are working, obviously with multiple other vendors to make sure that customers can benefit from technologies. Obviously, no single customer is going to be completely dedicated to a single vendor. They're going to have technologies from multiple vendors. We wanna make sure that that works for our customers. Our partnership strategy is driven by that belief in an open ecosystem, and the ability to work collaboratively to support customer needs. Thank you. Thanks, Jay. The next question is from Jason Celino of KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Great. Thank you. You know, Ajei, you mentioned cloud-native, you know, the strategy targeting new users and new use cases. You know, can you just talk about this TAM extension a little bit? Is it about moving, you know, down or earlier in the design cycle or down market? Thanks. As far as moving, you know, early or sort of the democratization of simulation, there are a number of things that we've been doing, and I think that's continues to be important in our strategy. Number one is making our technology more accessible, easier to use. We have, you know, we have certainly advances with respect to our ANSYS Discovery product portfolio. We continue to try to make the technology more accessible to less experienced engineers. You know, some of the advances that we've made on technology on things like numerics, and other areas of physics. What we're democratizing simulation by really expanding the use case of problems. Think about problems that we can solve today that couldn't be solved earlier in a reasonable amount of time. The investments that we're making are allowing customers to take advantage of this advanced simulation capability, and we see that as a form of democratization. And certainly, the investments that we're making across GPUs as well makes technology easier. There's some really interesting work that we're doing with AI/ML to help democratize simulation. As you know, simulation can be difficult to set up and, you know, take an example, setting up something like a turbulent flow can be quite complex. And we're using AI/ML techniques, for example, to help democratize that and make that easy for end users to set up Fluent simulations. I could go on and on. With respect to cloud, obviously accessing simulation in the cloud opens the door to smaller customers who may not necessarily have access to high-speed computing. That's certainly democratizing simulation. And our continued investments in APIs, I think also makes that easier for customers to build automation or special purpose applications on top of simulation. All of this in the aggregate extends the reach of simulation into areas where it wasn't being used before. Okay. Interesting. Thanks. Then just a quick follow-up, you know, really strong Q1 ACV. I know you mentioned for Q2 some renewal dynamics, but I thought I'd just double-check. Was anything closed earlier in Q1? Thanks. Yeah, Jason, thanks for the question. Yeah, the business is playing out as we expected at the start of the year. Our Q2 renewal dynamic is something that was considered in our full year guidance when we initiated in February. As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, there's a structural timing dynamic in our renewal base for Q2, and that happens from time to time. Quarterly dynamics, as we've always said, can be really volatile and are not representative of momentum in the business. What has changed since we initiated guidance in Q1 was, I do point out we had a great Q1, where we not only grew 19% in constant currency, but we beat the midpoint of our guidance. In addition to that, our constant currency outlook for the quarters improved. In our view of ACV growth before the impact of foreign exchange, which we talked about in the prepared remarks, it's increased based on the development of our pipeline since initiating guidance in February. It's also underwritten by a highly recurring ACV model, with over 80% of our ACV is recurring, and a very strong base of renewals that we see in the second half. If we step aside from the volatility quarters can have, and you look at the implied ranges in our guidance, our guidance range implies double-digit constant currency growth for the first half and growth above our model of 12% in the second half, again, underwritten by that very strong renewal base, resulting in the 12.5% constant currency growth outlook at the midpoint, which is almost 1 point above the midpoint we indicated in February. We, we feel really good about where we landed in Q1 after a really strong Q4 and strong 2022. The guidance that we give reflects the continued and improved optimism that we have overall in the business, notwithstanding, you know, structural dynamics that sometimes happen in quarters which introduce volatility. That's why we're always focused on the full year, and how we progress our view of the full year. Great. Thanks for the comprehensive answer. Thank you. You're welcome. The next question is from Steve Tusa of JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning. Good morning. Just to follow up on that question, you mentioned the structural dynamics. Can you maybe just delve into that a little more? That just sounds like it's some timing from that perspective. Then, secondly, just on the remarks, there were a few less, you know, seven and eight figure deals mentioned in the remarks than, you know, last quarter in particular. Anything to read into there as far as the size of the deals that you're booking this quarter? Sure. Let me start with your first question, we'll go to the second. In terms of the renewal base, you know, the timing of customer renewals happen at natural cycles within the quarter. As we have been moving to the strategic selling motion, and bringing, you know, individual kind of development teams, projects in a customer to more strategic multi-year lease arrangements, sometimes the timing of renewals can shift, you know, on a year-to-year basis over time, right? Which is the reason why we're very focused on the full year dynamic, because we take deals when they naturally occur, because it optimizes the outcome for our customers and it optimizes the outcome for ANSYS, which ultimately optimizes the outcome for investors. The dynamic around the quarter is just something that happens from time to time. We had very, very strong Q1. The first half is still strong in double digits, so we're feeling really good about where we're at, and there's nothing about Q2 that wasn't contemplated or seen or known when we started the year. As it relates to fewer seven and eight figure deals, I would say the underlying dynamic around our large deal progression is not unchanged from any other, you know, prior Q1s. As you know, Q4s are seasonally highest quarter. You tend to have a lot more closing in the quarter, so on a relative basis, there may be more mentions. The underlying dynamics around the strength of the pipeline, around the ability, to drive strategic relationships and larger deals with our customers' willingness to engage, customers' willingness to close, none of those aspects have changed since we spoke in February about how, the shape of the business is progressing. That makes a ton of sense. Just one more longer term follow-up. Ajei, I'm probably not the smartest tech guy on this call for sure. Obviously, AI, ML, HPC, all this stuff just seems to be pretty incredible and moving at a very fast pace. When do you think that inflection can tangibly influence your growth rate? I know you guys have a kind of a 10-year view on this stuff, but I mean, it seems like with the acceleration in these technologies that maybe it is, you know, pulling forward that impact to your growth perhaps from several years from now to maybe, I don't know, 18, 24 months. I mean, is it that? Is it that visible of a growth driver given the progression that's happening and how accelerated it's been? Well, see, I think one of the important things to recognize is we've been investing in these technologies for a while. One of the reasons why I wanted to take the time during the call to go through them is because, you know, there's just because of exactly the dynamic you mentioned, there appears there is a lot of activity in the marketplace, and certainly people are aware of advances in technologies. And it's, it's an area where there's been a lot of discussion. But if you think of areas like numerics as an example, that's been the bread and butter of ANSYS. That's really understanding, you know, the mathematics and the engineering and the science around around being able to appreciate and predict physical phenomena. That is, that is applicable, of course, across our portfolio. The HPC activity is certainly been included within our business for a while. If you think about the vectors of growth that we talked about in our investor day last year, we talked about more users, we talked about more products, and we talked about more computations. The more computations vector is being driven by high-performance computing and the desire for customers to solve larger and larger problems which are solvable as you start to introduce additional cores, you start to introduce GPUs and other architectures. AI/ML is obviously an area where we've been investing, as I said, for a while. We have products in the market today that are taking advantage of AI/ML capabilities. These are all technologies, and I don't want to repeat what I said on the call, but these are all technologies and areas where there continues to be investment in within ANSYS and of course, across the industry, and we continue to reap the benefit within our products to benefit our customers. Great. Thanks a lot. The next question is from Ken Wong of Oppenheimer. Please go ahead. Great. Thank you for taking the question. Nicole, just back on the 2Q ACV. I realize we're maybe beating the dead horse here, but I think kind of the one consistent, you know, question we're getting from investors is just making sure that this has nothing to do with extended sales cycles or potentially smaller deal size commitments. You know, the structure of those, you know, particular KPIs are consistent with what you're seeing in past quarters. Yes. That's absolutely the case. I mean, this is just about an over, you've, I know, have been with us quite a while. You've seen quarters go up and down, based on these renewal dynamics, which is again, why we focus on the full year. There's nothing about the underlying dynamics in Q2 that are indicative of anything other than an underlying renewable base that has a skew within the year that is driving those dynamics. Got it. Perfect. Perfect. Maybe just wanted to check on direct versus SMB. I mean, with all the kind of disruption in our banking system right now, there's always a little concern that maybe SMBs will have a harder time getting financing. Any changes in terms of what you're seeing on the lower end of the market? I mean, the underlying dynamics across all of our different customer segments have been performing pretty consistently as we've seen in prior Q1s. We had a lot of strength, of course, in the enterprise segment with the larger deals that we did this year and really strong in the Americas. I would say we had strong growth across all three customer segments consistent with what we've had in the past. Great. Thank you very much. Mm-hmm. The next question is from Adam Borg of Stifel. Please go ahead. Hey, good morning. This is Mike Richards on for Adam Borg. Thanks for taking the question. I was just wondering if you could talk about, you know, linearity in the quarter and how that's shaping up so far in the second quarter. Thanks. I mean, I would say overall revenue linearity was pretty similar to what it was last year. It was slightly more skewed to the third month, but it was pretty much in line overall. Great. Thanks. The next question is from Joe Vruwink with Baird. Please go ahead. Great. Hi, everyone. Ajei, just going back to your earlier discussion on democratizing simulation. I think to this point, a lot of people think of Discovery when you say that, and moving ANSYS into design and early-stage development. Do the AI capabilities you've embedded with the high-end solvers begin to remove any sorts of bounds or ceilings you maybe once associated with just the addressable users of an upper-end product? When you think about the AI capabilities that we've got, you know, we're using AI in multiple areas, and one area that I mentioned, of course, is making it easier for people to use products. I gave the example of Fluent earlier in response to one of the questions. That's a great example of making the technology, making our flagships easier to use. Discovery is also making the technologies easier to use in a more broad-based manner. The use of AI/ML is very targeted within the portfolio. Another direction that we're going, and we talked about this in our investor meeting or investor day last year, was our ability to start to support applications. One of the ways in which you can democratize simulation is allowing users to take advantage of applications. Purpose-built applications for their needs that are built, that take advantage of simulation. To that end, we've created a set of APIs, based on Python, which allow people to build applications, workflows, things of that nature that further democratize simulation. We're taking multiple routes to be able to make that happen. And in each of the directions, we're addressing a different opportunity to be able to broaden the use case of a simulation. Maybe just as a follow-up and related to your last comment, when you have customers and users creating purpose-built applications, this really gets into, I would imagine, more domain expertise aligned within high-tech, within aerospace and defense, within auto. Do you think this is kind of the conduit for, of course, bigger deals, more strategic deals? That's already been happening, does this kind of unlock a second wave of that phenomenon? Well, certainly, the fact that we have the ability for people to write these automations or extensions, taking advantage of the power of our portfolio, using Python, where they can use other routines, open source, other things that are outside of simulation to bring that into a sort of an overall workflow, that is something that has helped us, that's helping us today. I mean, there are examples of customers who have increased their use of ANSYS technologies because they've been able to build a very integrated workflow on top of this technology that allows more users to take advantage of what was previously restricted to a relatively small number of users. The phenomenon that you're saying of driving incremental opportunity within our portfolio is absolutely the case. Furthermore, we would imagine outside of our, you know, even outside of the engineering use case, you could imagine long-term, and this is a long-term statement, you could imagine other applications targeting others who are looking for the insights of physics-based simulation to be delivered to them. And we've talked about, and certainly last year, we talked about a healthcare example, where someone delivering medical care, a surgeon delivering medical care uses an application, which is, which is built for that surgeon. It has nothing to do, as far as they're concerned, nothing to do with physics per se. They're all about delivering the care that they need to deliver. But underneath, simulation is being done to influence the directions that they go. Those are examples of next-generation applications, which we believe will happen in the long term, but that's not a short-term impact. As we build out our capabilities, we believe that we're enabling both the short-term opportunity as well as the long-term opportunity, which we've been calling, you know, the notion of being able to get to pervasive insight. Great. Thank you very much. The next question is from Blair Abernethy of Rosenblatt Securities. Please go ahead. Thank you. Ajei, just wondering if you could drill in a little bit for us on the aerospace and defense vertical, you know, $74 million deal there. That's great. I just wanted to see, you know, what are you seeing in the defense side in particular, given what's been happening in the last 12 months? You know, any shift in buying patterns in that market? Well, I mean, obviously, A&D continues to be one of our top industries. You know, our aerospace customers are facing, you know, complex challenges. You know, things like engine design, light weighting, those continue to be areas of investment for our customers, but also a lot of work on Space 2.0 and the ability to be able to launch payloads into space. That's another area where there continues to be a lot of interest. You know, obviously commercial air is recovering post-pandemic. There continues to be more interest. Of course, from a defense perspective, there's obviously a global perspective. You're seeing this certainly in the United States. You're seeing this, you see, increased spending in Germany, for example. All of that represents long-term tailwinds into the aerospace and defense industries. And we certainly are very well-positioned, given the nature of our technologies, to be able to take advantage of that. Great. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from Josh Tilton of Wolfe Research. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. My first one's an easy one. What was the contribution of DYNAmore to ACV in the quarter? We had spoken about DYNAmore for the full year as being about EUR 30 million-EUR 35 million, with about half, about half of it being in Q1 in our February call. The underlying assumption you can make is that we're pretty in line with what we said, what we expected in February. Perfect. Thank you. Then I guess my follow-up is, I totally understand that the first half, second half dynamics are kind of playing out, as you expected when you first gave guidance in the beginning of the year. But I guess my question is, the world has kind of changed since then. Is there anything you can give us maybe from your conversations with customers that's just increasing your confidence that some of these second half renewals won't get pushed out if the macro continues to deteriorate? Yeah, I mean, here's the pragmatic answer to that is if customers don't renew, they lose access to the software and they can't build their products. The renewal base is very, very sticky, because it affects their R&D cycles. Just to kind of take it a step back and to contextualize kind of where we sit in the corporate decision-making process and what has happened, in other kind of, economic events. You know, simulation tends to be the last thing that gets shut off and the first thing that gets turned back on. That's because it is connected to people's R&D. The investments in R&D tend to be longer long-term views as opposed to, short-term tactics. That's one. The second is even within the R&D process, the areas that are most susceptible would be areas that are connected to seat counts and people. That's not how the economics of our software work. Our software is. The way customers use our software is based on the capacity of compute that they need and the software that they need to run their simulations within their R&D cycle. If there are underlying changes in the footprint of the R&D part of the business, it doesn't really affect our part of the software stack in the R&D cycle. The last part is simulation actually can provide tailwinds for and support the underlying cost efficiencies of our customers in their R&D cycle. Using simulation reduces the need for physical prototyping. It shortens the innovation cycle. You can have a single analyst run, you know, multiple simulations at the same time. The throughput that you get and the efficiency that you get from using simulation to build products has a very high ROI. In times where you're looking to transform, you know, simulation is valuable, not just in accelerating time to value to accelerate the top line, but also to support running R&D in a more efficient manner. Those are the underlying qualitative dynamics. The real answer on the renewal base is that it's very, very sticky, and a small, you know, short-term disruption in the economic outlook has historically not had an impact on our overall business. Just to amplify what Nicole said and to add a little bit more color as well. We're not tied to the number of units produced, right? If you cut back on production for whatever reason, your R&D efforts still continue because you're building for the long term. If you look at all of the industries that we serve, there are major transformations that are taking place in each of the industries, and the long-term competitiveness of organizations is at stake. If you're in the automotive industry, for example, electrification is front and center, autonomy is front and center. Stepping back from any of these activities will result in, you know, a long-term degradation of their business, and no one wants to go through it. What we're seeing and what we saw in the past, we saw this when we had this, you know, when Lehman went out of business back in the day. We saw that R&D was the last that was cut, and we saw that it was the first thing that was restored. The lesson that was learned after that, and there were reports and, you know, there was a lot of postmortem done after that. The lessons that were learned is that the organizations that continued to invest in R&D were the ones that came out of that downturn and were successful afterwards. You see, when we talk to customers, our value proposition is not just about accelerating R&D as I described, but our value proposition, as Nicole said, is also about being able to help cost. We have well established I mean, chapter and verse, we can talk about how we can reduce warranty costs, how we can make engineers more efficient. We can talk about how we can reduce the amount of raw materials that are being used for experimentation purposes as they move away from physical prototyping. That is a very hard ROI that we can make, and we can make that case. I've talked to our sales leaders around the world, I've talked to customers around the world, you know, I'm getting strong support for our for the guidance that we've given you. We're seeing the markets, the customers are committed. We're seeing that the nature of the technology that we provide is critical. We see our negotiations and discussions with customers kind of going as we expect. We call it as we see it. We're not trying to come up with sort of speculation of what the markets might look like. We just call it as we see it. We can give you a perspective on where our customers are, how they're buying, and all of that is reflected within our, within the way that we're guiding. We feel great about the guidance we've given you. We feel great about the second half of the year. We feel great about Q2. As Nicole has said several times on this call, there is an underlying dynamic of the renewals of our business. For those of you who've been following our company for multiple years, that underlying dynamic is exactly something that we've seen year after year after year. We've always had quarters which are stronger and quarters which are relatively weaker in that context of the overall full year. We managed the full year, and that's important for us, and we feel really good about where we are right now. Super helpful. Really appreciate the thoughtful response. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for closing remarks. I'm excited about our outstanding start to 2023. I would like to thank the One ANSYS team around the world for our ongoing success. Our superior technology, our broad-based business momentum, and our strong customer relationship give us even greater confidence in our ability to execute against long-term goals. Thank you for joining us this morning. I hope you all have a great day. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.