All right, great. Thanks everyone for joining us today. I am Matt Pfau, the analyst at William Blair, that covers Aspen. For a complete list of our disclosures, you can visit williamblair.com. Antonio is President and CEO. He has a few slides he's going to go over. We also have Chantelle Breithaupt up with us as well, CFO. I'll let Antonio take it away, and then we'll get into some fires. All right. Thank you, Matt, and good afternoon, everyone. Glad to be here again. As Matt said, I'll quickly cover a few slides to set up the conversation, and then we'll go into the fireside chat. I'm still not able to progress the slides. Okay, there we go. Let's see. Okay, gotta show the safe harbor statement. Use of non-GAAP financial measures, since we'll show a couple of slides with them, and then... Certainly in the last 12 months, the main event for AspenTech was the transaction that we did with Emerson, which closed May 16th of last year, so just over a year ago. The thesis for the transaction really about building an industrial software company with much larger scale. A company that has access to a deeper investment capacity, and by that, Emerson's balance sheet, in order to do M&A. A company with an expanded sales channels, principally the Emerson sales channels, but also greater market expertise across many more industries, especially the utilities, transmission and distribution industry, upstream, oil and gas, and then the access to the pharma industry. Of course, a broader set of solutions that drive greater value, not only from a profitability standpoint, but also sustainability. Today, AspenTech is about 3,700 employees, more than 3,000 customers globally. Founded almost 42 years ago now, really. Really a company that is focused on driving digitalization, around asset-intensive industries, oil and gas, upstream, midstream, downstream, chemicals, bulk chemicals, specialty chemicals, utilities, transmission and distribution, the E&C industry, and then pharma, leveraging the Emerson relationship, and eventually mining when we close the acquisition that we've announced of Micromine. Asset-intensive industries, where digitalization is being used to drive operational excellence. Today, the company has five suites of products, and it's really about optimizing across a full asset life cycle. When one of our customers thinks about building a new asset, a new plant, AspenTech's products and solutions can be used to design, and optimize the design of that asset. Once that asset is built, we optimize the operation, and eventually, we also help drive greater reliability and maintenance. The two new suites that AspenTech has taken on through the Emerson transaction are the Digital Grid Management suite, which are the products from Open Systems International, one of the companies that Emerson contributed to the transaction. The capabilities are about really the management and optimization of transmission and distribution of electricity. The drivers for the utilities industry being expansion of the grid, the complexity of the grid, the increasing complexity of the grid because of renewables, and then cyber securing the grid. These are the three main drivers for the implementation of OSI, the Digital Grid Management suite. A new one that is showing up more and more as a result of climate change is outages. Basically, the damage caused by storms, and the disruptions that it creates with electricity supply, and therefore, the need that these utilities have to restore electricity to users, consumers, as soon as possible once a storm or an event happens. The Subsurface Science & Engineering suite is about historically modeling the subsurface for exploration and production of oil and gas. Now, those same capabilities are even more relevant for carbon capture and sequestration and geothermal energy. While historically, that suite has been sold to oil and gas companies to explore and then produce oil or gas, now there's many more use cases around the injection of CO2 in the subsurface to capture and store that gas. A whole new business is being built. When you think about these three suites, our Performance Engineering, our Manufacturing and Supply Chain, and our Asset Performance Management suite, they've historically been thought of as driving profitability, but now more and more, they're being thought of as driving also sustainability. The ability to model hydrogen systems, the ability to model biofuel systems, the ability to now even model electrical car batteries or direct air carbon capture systems. There's a whole range of new use cases for our products, and it used to be that we would model molecules in hydrocarbon systems, our products are now modeling molecules in renewable systems. It's one of the great benefits of our capabilities. Certainly, with Digital Grid Management, we're incredibly well positioned around electrification, and with Subsurface Science & Engineering around carbon capture and sequestration, and geothermal energy as well. We've traveled with our customers around along the digitalization journey. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when their plants were transformed from analog and numeric controls to digital, the big data moment happened in the process industries, and customers have been digitalizing their operations ever since, especially in the refining and chemicals industry. Today, these customers are thinking is about, how do we use technology to transform our businesses to new business models that are acceptable by society around the requirements of climate change and circularity as well, plastic waste? Our focus is developing and putting in place a set of suites of technology that support and enable our customers in their energy transition and in their transition to new business models going forward. Today, what are the drivers? Why do this? Well, if you look at the statistics, global population will continue to grow, expected to be 9.7 billion people by 2050. The standard of living is increasing, so it's expected that the middle and upper class will grow by 40% by 2030. What does that mean? Well, there's a greater demand for everything. Products that we consume, more population, higher standard of living, we buy more, we consume more. All that macro, that driver, will therefore drive greater consumption of energy. The expectation that energy consumption will go up by 50% by 2050, 75% has to come from electricity, and 90% from renewables in order to hit net zero carbon emissions. Metals for electrification, in order to enable electrical vehicles and the electrification of the global economy, have to increase by 600% by 2035. The expectation that chemical demand will grow by 300% by 2050, and the investment in infrastructure to facilitate the energy transition expected to be $150 trillion by 2050. $3 trillion-$4 trillion of CapEx investments across the globe to achieve net zero carbon emissions and circularity by 2050. It's a huge secular trend that will require significant amounts of technology. How do we frame this opportunity? We call it the dual challenge. How do we help our customers meet the increasing demand for resources from a growing population with an increasing standard of living, while also addressing sustainability goals? This is the runway that we believe we're creating and we've created for Aspen Technology. It's all about digitalization, because digitalization technology is being thought of as a driver for operational excellence, and operational excellence is about reliability, it's about safety, it's about sustainability and profitability. We don't believe with the use of our technologies, there's a trade-off between profitability and sustainability. You can achieve both. This is an example, global refining. The global refining industry, through the use of our products and solutions, we estimate that they create about $22 billion in value every year in profitability, incremental profitability, but they also reduce their CO2 emissions by 16 million metric tons. That's because we drive efficiencies in their operations that lead them to be more profitable, but also emit less CO2. How will this work? The energy transition will be a multi-decade transition, and we believe that in this decade, it's about energy efficiency, it's about emissions management, it's about electrification, waste reduction, water conservation. The technologies that exist today to scale and achieve at least 40% of the CO2 emission reductions that need to be achieved in order to hit net zero carbon emissions, the technologies exist today. There's new technologies that will have to be in place by the next decade, 2030- 2040, that have to be scaled. They exist, but they have to be scaled. Hydrogen production, biofuel feedstocks, carbon capture and sequestration, renewable energy. We see the investments that are going into these areas, and we're seeing the pilot plants, the initial plants, but it will take about five to 10 years to scale these technologies so that they become material contributors to CO2 emission reduction. Then 2040, 2050, we're talking about really new technologies that are being developed, new materials, plastic circularity, the use of the CO2 that will be captured and stored on the subsurface as a feedstock to create new materials as well. The idea that eventually CO2 will be feedstock for new materials as well. This is the pathways to sustainability, and the thing is that every company has a different pathway based on their strengths and the environment where they operate. As a result. of this opportunity, we've been focusing on really elevating the functionality in our products that addresses sustainability and introducing new functionality. Today, there's over 100 application templates that are available to our customers through our customer support center, where they can go in and use an existing model as a startup model, if you will, as an initial model that they can then, you know, play with, learn around, and eventually use to fine-tune it to their plans. There'll be many more that we continue to introduce going forward, but this is how we think about accelerating learning and the path to sustainability for our customers. There's many examples already. I just talked to you about global refining and the $22 billion in value and the 16 million metric tons of CO2 emission reductions. There's customers in the chemical space, there's customers in utilities, there's customers in oil and gas, in mining, pulp and paper, and many other areas where this is already being applied. You know, Google uses our engineering modeling suite to model their direct air carbon capture systems that use the heat generated by their data centers to power these DAC systems, direct air carbon capture, and they model those systems, they design those systems using our engineering software. So does Meta. Tesla uses our engineering software to do research and development around their electrical batteries. CarbonCapture Inc., which is one of the initial companies that developed the direct air carbon capture technology, uses our engineering software to design and build those assets, as well as Carbon Engineering, which is one of their competitors. A lot of applications. Let me tell you a little bit about our highlights. We announced our results in Q3. The company is projected to be a double-digit grower this year, with high profitability, a positive macro environment, although the chemical industry is going through a little bit of a slowdown, with the expectation that by the end of the year, there will be now greater demand. The integration of the two Emerson businesses that they contributed, OSI and SSE, is going well, and we do differentiate between integration and transformation. We're transforming the business model of these two businesses, but we're also integrating them, and the integration is going well. The transformation, we've had some learnings over the last nine months, but we believe that those learnings we will apply into our fiscal year 2024 and beyond, we're building a foundation. We're still working to close the Micromine transaction, which we've already announced, and, there's no borrowings on our balance sheet as of March 31st, 2023. From a transformation standpoint, a lot of learning. Some of the assumptions that we made when we built the deal model for these two assets have been validated, others have proven, incorrect, and others, have gone according to plan. Overall, the most important thing is that this is a year of foundation building, fiscal 2023, and all these learnings and knowledge that we have gained over the last 12 months, we're now applying going forward for fiscal 2024, and the guidance we will eventually provide in order to execute on what we really think is a journey of multiple years, and eventually to take advantage of an opportunity that will be 10-20, 30 years going forward. A lot of exciting stuff going on in the company right now. We're very busy. There's strong conviction around the synergies that were identified as part of the transaction, and by the end of the five years, we will have achieved the synergies, both cost and profitability synergies as well. Look at just the value proposition for the new AspenTech. Tremendous value creation for our customers, uniquely positioned for sustainability. We have a market leadership position, not only the heritage AspenTech solutions, but also the OSI technology and the SSE technology. Very diverse company. It is a company rooted on innovation and expertise, mission-critical products and solutions, a world-class customer base with well-understood growth opportunities. Our goal, again, is to make the new AspenTech and drive it to the best-in-class profitability and free cash flow growth that the heritage AspenTech business used to deliver. We have the investment capacity that Emerson provides, so that we can be more active in the market around the M&A. With that, thank you, we can go to the Q&A. Great. Thanks. Thanks, Antonio. Sorry. Okay. Just wanna follow up on in terms of the Emerson transaction. What was the rationale behind there, and why was that perhaps, you know, more attractive than other potential options that were out there when you were sort of looking at, you know, strategic options for the business? Yeah. I mean, look, prior to, in late 2019, 2020, what we were seeing in the market was a market where certainly AspenTech has had a tremendous position around a specific segment of the market, optimization, automation, in the process industries, oil and refining and chemicals, and the E&C industry. I think the concern of the board was that even though we had a highly optimized and highly valuable business, there were industrials moving in that were making software acquisitions that could eventually corner AspenTech, I call it pigeonhole AspenTech, into a small segment of the market with really no exit ability out of that corner. The board decided to evaluate potential strategic alternatives, and after a process, eventually Emerson emerged as the best candidate, not only because of their ability to pay what they paid and contribute these two assets, but really an alignment around cultures of the two companies. Emerson is a technology company. It's also an American company. We felt, and I felt that there were a lot of alignment around our cultures as companies. More importantly, there was a significant alignment on how I thought about the future with AspenTech and Lal Karsanbhai the CEO of Emerson as well. There was a lot of similarity on our, on our vision. As a result, we entered into this transaction. A nd the two software assets, SSE and DGM, that you got from Emerson, why were you attracted to those assets, and how do you think they add value to your business? Yeah, look, at the initial perimeter of software that Emerson proposed was much bigger. The fact is that they were willing to make a much greater contribution to AspenTech. In that, my focus was on quality of assets, and did they align, did they support the strategic vision for AspenTech? One, where sustainability was becoming more and more important, therefore, global electrification, and the OSI business is one of the prime companies in that space. Then the SSE business, at that point, you would question, "Well, why more oil and gas," when oil was trading at a very low oil price, and everyone wanted to get rid of oil. Having been in the industry for a long time, I felt that there were still some runway, probably another five to seven years. More importantly, this transition into carbon capture and sequestration into geothermal energy. Also, if you wanna store nuclear material, you have to understand the subsurface, the hydropower under the subsurface as well, you have to understand the geology. There are just many applications for the use of that technology that we will explore and eventually develop. I felt these were the two assets that truly created a great offering around sustainability for AspenTech, and really change and move the company into two other industries where we had not been before. Let's move into the end markets a little bit and just what you're seeing there. In the energy end market, let's start with that. What are you seeing from a demand perspective? Maybe it'd be helpful to just sort of frame, how does demand for your solution ebb and flow with the price of oil? Yeah. Energy, the energy market is sort of a big word because it's oil, it's gas, and that is refining as well. We know what the price of oil is, and it's been varying between, call it $65, $80 a barrel. I think that's a sweet spot for oil, for producers and consumers. CapEx investments are supported by that sort of level in the price of oil. Gas prices, although they've come down, they've benefited over the last 12 months. Really, gas is seen as a transition fuel, which will see tremendous demand over the next 10, 20 years. Refining margins have come down from historic, from historical highs. They are now more in the traditional range of refining margins, but that's a good range because, in a way, it supports greater optimization and driving efficiencies on these assets. The dynamics around the price of oil and our business, I think are less so today, but nonetheless, oil prices drive CapEx investments. CapEx supports the use of our technology, especially with E&Cs, but also in the upstream sector. When oil drops below $50 a barrel, for example, there's certainly a reduction in CapEx investments, which then impacts the use of our software, especially with E&Cs. Now, E&Cs have restructured and transformed their own businesses because now they're less reliant on oil and gas CapEx, and more reliant on sustainability CapEx, hydrogen, biofuel, solar, wind, and other technologies that are getting a lot of, especially government-subsidized CapEx, going into sustainability. We have less exposure to oil and gas CapEx today, but it's still there. Let's move on to the chemicals end market. It seems like of the end markets you're in, that's the one that has been a bit more sensitive to the macro. Perhaps, you know, what are you seeing there? What do you expect to drive future growth in that segment? Look, we just talked about it. I mean, the expectation that chemicals demand will grow by 300% by 2050, I mean, that's huge, and a lot of that has to... The feedstock for chemicals is gas, so gas, cheap gas prices in the United States really support chemicals investments in the U.S., but also in the Middle East. Look, the chemicals industry had a tremendous run during the pandemic because of plastics and one-time plastic use to for protection. There was an overstocking during the pandemic, which has led to a destocking over the last six to nine months, and this has led to a slowdown in chemical demand and therefore has compressed the margins. The expectation by chemical companies is that demand will start to improve from the middle of the year onward. Their margins have already improved because they've pulled back on OpEx expenses, which is what's impacted us. When they pull back in OpEx expenses, they spend less on software. We do expect that this through the rest of the year, the dynamics will improve, and for calendar 2024, we'll see better budgets from the chemicals industry. Okay. DGM, the utility energy grid management market, what are you seeing there in terms of demand? Is that an area that's sensitive to the macro at all, or is it a little bit insulated from that? I'd like Chantelle to answer that. She's very excited about DGM. Yes utilities industry. Very true, very true. Thank you. I think from the DGM market, Matt, to your question, it's not as susceptible to demands that way. Just think of any business or homeowner wants to go home and have the electricity work, so that's not necessarily something that ebbs and flows. Tremendous demand on this industry. You know, they themselves say they feel they're behind from a technology perspective, and there's four main things that this industry's working against, but we feel is a tailwind in the sense of growth for DGM. There's cybersecurity in the software, in the sense of attacks on critical assets. There's outage management, you know, how quickly can they predict that the lights will come back on? There's the sense of grid expansion, just the pure population growth, electrification requiring more demand. The fourth one is in the sense of the complexity of renewables energy, and how do you ebb and flow things coming on off, up and off the grid? Those four things are in tremendous demand. We think it's a industry ripe for digitalization, similar to other industries like oil and gas and chemicals 20 years ago. The customers express that they want to go much faster. Sure. Yeah. Sure. mining, getting in there with Micromine, is any of your existing suite applicable to that segment? Why is mining an attractive or logical area for you to get into? Well, I mean, let me start with the last part of your point. Mining is an industry that's a laggard on digitalization. I mean, they're at the very, very early stages of digitalization, there's a huge opportunity. AspenTech's existing suites, the Engineering and Manufacturing and Supply Chain, and APM, Asset Performance Management, are applicable to the tail end of that industry. Once the minerals are exploited and transported, the processing of those minerals, the reliability required in those plants to process those minerals, that's where our technology can be applied. I don't know if you've ever heard of alumina refiners, which are refiners that process aluminum, turn it into, or alumina, to turn it into aluminum. It's just like an oil refiner, it's an alumina refinery. They use our products, our Performance Engineering suite, our Manufacturing and Supply Chain suite, our APM suite. Our APM suite, the product Mtell, is heavily used in the mining operations, excavation and movement of the material, because when one of these excavators fails in a diamond mine, it's $1 million an hour that they lose. The ability to predict failure in this big equipment is very important for the mining industry, and that's where we've gotten a lot of traction with our Mtell suite. We're at the tail end of that supply chain. Micromine brings to us the front end, the exploration, the mine design, mine planning, mine production, and then eventually into the refining and reliability and supply chain management as well. Mm-hmm. I think the last thing we would use in the portfolio is bringing DGM for the microgrids to come to the very beginning and throughout that process, so we can see quite a utilization of our portfolio across it. Sure. Yeah, I mean, these mines are in very remote locations. Most of them, they set up their own grids. Mm-hmm. They produce their own electricity, so they have a microgrid, and the management of that microgrid is very important. There's a customer in Australia, Fortescue, this is in the public domain. They are looking to convert all their power supply to hydrogen, so they've talked to us and probably other companies about what it would take to convert their operations to full, basically, green, sustainable power to power their mining operations. Great. What about long-term financial goals of the company? How do you think about those? Do you have any targets that are out there? Does the Emerson transaction change those at all? Yeah, I think that the Emerson transaction hasn't changed. If anything, I think, the assets that we curated were ones we could see. The, the heritage and current AspenTech model is double digit, ACV growth. We use annual contract value as our business metric. And then, you know, best-in-class profitability, looking at 45% non-GAAP operating margin of ACV, and then free cash flow of 40% or higher, free cash flow to ACV. That's the parameter, and we look for assets that we can get to that state in three to five years of a deal model, integration, transformation. The Emerson transaction only supports those, in the sense that those are the ones we brought in and holds that model for us, and that's what we're looking to get to. Those are the kind of numbers that if you look at the guidance or the projection when we close the transaction, that's what you would find there. Yes. I'll wrap with just one on acquisitions. Should we think of Micromine as sort of the model for what you're gonna be looking forward, in terms of acquisitions? Then, you know, how are you identifying these targets, and what sort of process do you run to evaluate them? Yeah, look, I think it's important to differentiate. There's companies that you buy, you have to transform their business model, because if you wanna be a best-in-class and profitability company with mid-teens growth, at scale, then anything you buy has to support that model. That's a transformation that we're doing on OSI and SSE. Micromine is an asset that is being run by private equity now for four or five years, highly optimized, best-in-class profitability, great growth. That asset, when we close the transaction, will come in highly clean. We'll integrate the back office, and it can operate as a standalone business with very little bandwidth from management to run it. That's a business that is about integration as opposed to transformation. Other assets in the market, we have a set of targets. This year, the market hasn't been conducive to M&A, and you buy what's available as opposed to what you want to buy. I think the combination of interest rates and valuations not yet resetting to expectations, I think will postpone any M&A into calendar 2024, when perhaps we'll have a better M&A environment. Yeah, the only other thing I'd add, and we're probably at time, is just that once we close Micromine, we'll have enough industries, and we have two great industries that are ripe for digitalization, metals and mining, and the T&D, transmission and distribution. Probably within those industries is where we would look just to add the kind of the portfolio, 'cause sometimes we get the question of, are you gonna go to other industries per se? Yeah. Great. Well, I think we're at time. There is a breakout session in Richardson upstairs. Hopefully everyone can join us. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.