Awesome! Thank you everyone for joining. My name is Dylan Becker. I'm the research analyst here at William Blair that covers Aspen Technology. For all the necessary disclosures, you can find those on williamblair.com. It's a pleasure to have Aspen's CEO, Antonio Pietri, here. He's got a prepared presentation that he's gonna run through, and then we'll probably have 10 minutes or so worth of Q&A. Antonio, thank you for taking the time, and I'll let you take it from here. Great. Thank you, Dylan, and glad to be here. Let me stand up to the... Oh, there's no- How do I do this? Okay, just stand up here. Well, there's no microphone here, so just caught a little bit by surprise, but you can hear me. So Aspen Technology, let me tell you a little bit about the company, disclosures, forward-looking statements, and so on. Look, AspenTech is into six asset-intensive industries that we call: oil and gas, chemicals, engineering and construction companies that serve those industries, utilities, mining, and the pharmaceutical industry. That sort of created a world-class customer base. Some of the biggest companies in the world are AspenTech customers. It's given us a market leadership position. The fact is that our leading products range in market share from 40%-50% to 70% in those markets, a strong vertical penetration into those industries. The fact is that while these customers can run their assets without our technologies, they would do it a lot less efficiently, generate a lot less profitability and efficiencies, and therefore our products are considered mission-critical for them in that it helps them optimize run more efficiently, more resilient, and deliver greater sustainability for themselves and their own customers. The premise has always been innovation and expertise. As you will see, the company is originally a spin-off from MIT. We've retained that sort of innovation DNA, and a lot of what we do is either organic or inorganic innovation that is really driven by a strong and very diverse group of incredibly smart employees and most of them engineers. Before the Emerson transaction, used to be mostly chemical engineers, now they range from chemical to electrical, petroleum, geophysicists, geoscientists, mechanical engineers, and very proud to lead what is an incredibly smart team of people. Look, ultimately, the value proposition to our customers is value creation in their operations, in their across their enterprise, and it's on that premise that then they they support us by installing and implementing our solutions. Something that's happened over the last 3-4 years is as companies and countries have started to declare net zero carbon emission ambitions, our customers started to realize that efficiencies deliver a lot of profitability, but efficiencies also deliver reduction in CO2 emissions. As you optimize your operations, you produce the same unit of output with less energy, therefore, less CO2 emissions. So our value proposition across profitability and sustainability is incredibly strong. Very well-understood growth opportunities that we'll talk about in a minute, and of course, we are on a journey prior to the transaction with Emerson, best-in-class profitability, 50% non-GAAP operating margins, double-digit growth, and that's the journey that we're on to get back to those sort of levels of performance. Now, with our partnership with Emerson, you know that we haven't had the ability to invest in M&A. We have, we do, because we generate a lot of free cash flow, but of course, Emerson, as a partner now, brings to us access to a much bigger balance sheet that would enable us to do bigger M&A if necessary. So this is our history. Started as a project in MIT, has evolved throughout over the last 40 years, a 42-year-old company, process modeling and simulation. We consolidated the advanced solution space in the process industries beginning in 1995. Between 1995 and 2002, we acquired 23, 23 companies. Best-in-class technology, which is what brought to us some of our leading products and solutions today. I became CEO in October of 2013, and we declared a new strategy, asset optimization. We extended from the design and operation of these assets into the maintenance and reliability. We acquired a number of companies and created a new suite, our Asset Performance Management suite, both predictive equipment failure, process degradation detection, and other capabilities in that suite. And then, almost two years ago, to the date, May, actually May 16th of 2022, we signed a transaction with Emerson Electric, where Emerson became the majority shareholder of AspenTech, by contributing $6 billion and, or paying $6 billion, and contributing two software businesses. Total transaction valued at $11.2 billion. Emerson today is a majority shareholder, but that really expanded the breadth of the company. Today, AspenTech is about $1.1 billion in revenue, 4,000 employees, and into the verticals that I mentioned and are listed there. But really, now access to many more channels to market. We recently held our global customer conference, and on the list, there were 2,000 people from 20 different industries attending the conference, which was even a surprise to me. But that speaks to the breadth of markets that Emerson has and that we now have access to as well. Look, this is our growth since just before the Emerson transaction, fiscal 2022, and the transaction closed in May 2022, which was our fiscal year 2022. Fiscal 2023 started July 1st, 2022, and we've been growing just low double-digit, high single-digit. We're guiding to greater than 99% growth this fiscal year. We're into our fourth quarter of fiscal 2024 at the moment. So, why Aspen Technology? The fact is that the asset-intensive industries have been in a journey of digitalization. Forty, fifty years ago, it was about pneumatic-controlled analog systems. These industries have been upgrading their systems to digital systems, distributed controlled systems, SCADA systems, and really, big data happened in these industries 30, 40 years ago. But with that data, there was a group of innovators that started to recognize that by leveraging that data, they could drive value in their operations by making them more efficient. As a result, AspenTech has been walking along the journey of our customers on digitalization, where first it was just paper notes, then spreadsheets, and now very sophisticated technologies to operate and optimize these facilities, where now we're doing multi-unit optimization, optimization across multiple assets on a global basis. And of course, the ultimate goal is to drive to the smart enterprise. And the smart enterprise is one that will leverage greater artificial intelligence capabilities, greater digitalization, to make decisions on a much more real-time basis, react to changes in the operations of the market as to capture value creation opportunities and deliver greater sustainability and resiliency in their operations. This is our strategy, very simple. It is about optimizing across a full asset life cycle. When someone starts to think about building a new asset, where do you place that asset? What is the configuration? What is the CapEx that will be required? What is the risk that are introduced into their system, therefore, system analysis? What is the redundancies that have to be taken care of? But then, once that asset is designed, optimizing the operation, how do we sweat that asset as to maximize the value, value creation, and reducing cost of operations? And then, how do we make sure that that asset runs for longer, by driving uptime through actionable insights, the ability to predict equipment failure or process degradation that avoids accidents and ultimately saves lives or improves sustainability. So it's about improving safety, greater sustainability, reliability, and optimization. And the fact is that an asset can be a plant or can be the grid. So with the Emerson transaction, the two suites of technologies that were contributed, a business that they call Geological Simulation Sciences. We've renamed it Subsurface Science and Engineering. Really, these were technologies used for, and still used for, oil and gas exploration and production. But those same technologies are the ones that are being deployed to produce for carbon capture and sequestration, to generate geothermal energy, even naturally occurring hydrogen and helium in the subsurface. Now, there's companies doing that, but also lithium production. We have some of our oil and gas customers that are into the production of lithium and are using these capabilities to assess wells from the standpoint of the production of lithium. And then the second suite is digital grid management, a company called Open Systems International, leading company in the transmission and distribution of electricity here in North America. 85% of the revenue originally in North America, but leading technologies around the operation, management of the grid, but also then the management of renewable energy into the grid, distributed energy resources, battery storage, production of solar or either electricity in homes and the two-way flow of electricity now that a homeowner can be a producer of electricity and a consumer at the same time. So very strong capabilities in that area. And then the suites at the top is our traditional suites, Performance Engineering, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, and Asset Performance Management. So our Engineering suite is really about optimizing the design of those assets, optimizing the CapEx, optimizing for energy efficiency, optimizing for safety. It's a leading suite in the market, about 50% market share in the, in asset-intensive industries. And the original product that was developed in MIT, Aspen Plus, is part of this suite, is the second-largest product, that we have in the company today. Our Manufacturing and Supply Chain suite is really about optimizing operations, but again, as you optimize operations, you drive sustainability. So our customers are realizing that by deploying multivariable process control, not only are they making their operations more stable, safer, and more efficient, and therefore driving greater profitability, but they are also improving their own carbon footprint. So this has become a major driver over the last three years for the deployment of some of our technologies in this suite, as customers think about hitting their net zero carbon emissions, in the future. Our asset performance management suite is about really reducing failure in equipment or avoiding process degradation due to changes in feedstock or the environment. Therefore, very sophisticated capabilities, a lot of artificial intelligence capabilities in this suite. Perhaps some of the most sophisticated technologies that AspenTech has reside in this suite. We have a product called ProMV that uses multivariate analytics to determine causation, the root cause of process degradation or failure in equipment. Very powerful technology that we acquired in 2016, 2017 as well, to create this suite of solutions.... This is a suite that OSI or Emerson contributed, Digital Grid Management. Very strong capabilities about generation management, transmission management, distribution management, but also the new generation of applications that are required to manage the complexity of the grid, Advanced Distribution Management Systems, Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems, Outage Management Systems. One thing that is happening now with storms is greater outages in the grid, therefore, the ability to recover faster is now a requirement by the utility operators. So, one of the things that OSI did over time was, as customers identified new needs, they developed capabilities to meet those requirements, and therefore, it's a very comprehensive suite of solutions that not only are deployed to manage the grid, and the entire Southern California grid is now running on AspenTech technology. The entire transmission network of India is running on AspenTech technology. 40% of utilities in the United States are running on AspenTech technology, but also in the Middle East, in Latin America, and Europe. But these same capabilities can be deployed for the management of gas distribution networks, water distribution networks, or also midstream gas facilities. So very powerful technology, leading technology in the space, and we consider it to be one of our growth drivers going forward. And then the subsurface science and engineering is all the capabilities that are required to do seismic analysis, interpretation of that data, imaging, and eventually reservoir engineering, production engineering to produce oil and gas. But again, the same capabilities that can be used for carbon capture and sequestration, geothermal energy, lithium production, or anything that happens in the subsurface, including the storage of nuclear material, nuclear waste material. So very strong capabilities. The capabilities of this suite are enhanced with our engineering suite because now you can optimize for the subsurface and above-surface facilities, which is called the Big Loop. Aspen Technology today is the only company that can model the entire petroleum supply chain, from the rock in the reservoir to the distribution of fuel to the gas station. So AspenTech, I would argue, started working on artificial intelligence before it became really popular, as in the last year or two. We started this journey 18 years ago, and our premise was that safe deployment of artificial intelligence in very dangerous and complex-to-operate assets had to be coupled with first principles of engineering. Because the fact is that the challenge of deploying AI in these assets is: how do you train the algorithms? And you cannot operate these assets into very dangerous areas of operation because you don't wanna risk it. Therefore, if you embed AI algorithms in your first principles of engineering products, like we've built over the last 40 years, then you have a combination of AI capabilities that enhance the accuracy and predictability of the products, and the first principles keeps AI within bound-- the boundaries of safe operation, provides the rules of the road, the guardrails. And this is our philosophy. So we did research and developed what we call a set of technologies that we've labeled Industrial AI that are about delivering agility, guidance, and automation by embedding AI algorithms into first principles of engineering products. And really, with the objective to start driving to the self-optimizing asset, the Smart enterprise. Assets that are self-learning, self-adapting, self-sustaining. They are highly monitored. They detect changes in operations, and these algorithms can detect them and suggest actions, take actions automatically, propose actions that then someone needs to review and approve, or can also detect for potential failure and notify a team that then has to go and look into this. So this is our vision. It's not gonna happen overnight. It will take time, but we believe that the capabilities now exist today, technology capabilities to drive to greater autonomy in the operation of very complex and dangerous-to-operate assets. So how do we go about innovation? Of course, we have a great team of very smart individuals driving innovation every day, but well, what's also happens in the pandemic is that our customers are going through their own journey, where they are looking for partners to help them in their own transition to a new energy system that is less that is cleaner. And therefore, we've been enhancing our partnerships with customers. As you can see, those are some of the customers listed in the middle. Also, third parties, companies like Microsoft. AspenTech is a member of the Microsoft Azure Quantum Consortium. We're the only software company in that consortium that is working to leverage quantum computing capabilities on the cloud through our technologies. But also we have an Aspen Academic Advisory Board, very smart professors from some of the top universities in the United States that are contributing and are keeping us aware of some of the latest developments in academia around optimizers and other capabilities that would be of interest to us or that could potentially be disruptive to Aspen Technology as well. So a very strong ecosystem happening here. So look, our mission is a dual challenge, which is help our customers meet the increasing demand for resources from a growing population with the expectation of better standard of living, while also addressing sustainability goals. That creates a huge opportunity because the global population continues to grow, where about 8 billion people today will be 9.7 billion by 2050. 40% growth in the middle and upper class, that that means greater demand for everything: energy, plastics, chemicals, anything that you can think of, because we all wanna buy and, and have a better standard of living. So that means that 34% increase in energy demand by 2050, 86% of it from electricity, 84% of that has to be from renewables. That means greater complexity in the grid, a grid that has to expand, a grid that has to be cyber secure, and this is what our DGM suite does. An expectation that chemicals demand will grow by 300% by 2050, and therefore, more assets, and greater, bigger assets that have to be up, designed, optimized, and operated for longevity. Then out of COP 28, the expectation that if we're really gonna hit 0 carbon emissions by 2050, we have to double energy efficiency, and this is what AspenTech has done through our existence. And that means really to go from 2%-4% in energy efficiency. It doesn't seem like a lot, but it's a huge difference, and then tripling the installation of renewable capacity, renewable energy, sun, wind, solar, and power, which is what will drive sustainability. But this also increases the complexity of the grid, introduction of renewable energy, and therefore more technology to manage that complexity. So why this? Well, it's driving massive macro investments. Four trillion dollars CapEx investments per year required by 2030, in order to achieve some of these goals of tripling renewable capacity and doubling efficiency. Three trillion dollars by 2030 to expand the grid and upgrade systems in the grid. Five trillion dollars in digitalization required by 2050 to hit some of the net zero goals. These are the, these are the macro trends that we've lined behind to drive our growth going forward. So we're believers that greater use of technology and digitalization will be required to achieve better performance, resiliencies, and sustainability, which is all in the realm of operational excellence, which is really what we focus on as a company. So if you look at these metrics, this is about five years old, but we estimate that through the use of our engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and asset performance management suite, our customers create about $59 billion in value every year. Global refiners, our global customer base of refiners is about $22 billion of that $59 billion, but that also represents $22 billion in profitability. It also represents 16 million metric tons of CO2 emission reductions. And that's a big number compared to some of the investments that are required to take CO2 out of the atmosphere. So what's happening also is that there's a new cost as a result of sustainability, there's a new generation of customers that are now becoming customers of AspenTech, and these are some of them. It is because they're all trying to drive decarbonization of their operations. They have their own Net Zero carbon emission goals, and they're looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint. So Google and Meta are designing direct air capture systems that are being powered by the heat that is being generated by data centers. So they're hiring chemical engineers to design these systems that then use our software, know about our software, and are using our software to design those systems. Tesla, for example, or Rivian, they're hiring chemical engineers to do research and research on the chemistry of electrical batteries and design electrical batteries, and they're using our engineering suite in that research and design of those batteries. You have companies like Fervo Energy doing geothermal energy, and they're using our engineering suite and our subsurface capabilities for geothermal energy production, carbon capture, and Carbon Engineering. These are some of the early companies that did research on the design of direct air capture plants. Occidental is building the largest direct air capture plant, a $500 million investment for 1 million metric tons of CO2 capture per year, and they're using our engineering software. So an evolving customer base, by the way, 45-8 Energy, they're doing research and exploring for naturally occurring hydrogen and helium in the subsurface, which is a very early days of that thesis, the fact that there's a lot of hydrogen and helium in the subsurface. If you don't know, there's a helium shortage in the world, so if you wanna do your birthday party for your kids, you better go get some helium early on, although it'll be more expensive in the future. And then these are some of the use cases around sustainability, and it's not that the technologies don't exist, the fact is that technologies exist for every one of these use cases. It's just about the scale of the technology. So when we talk about today, these are technologies that have been scaled, not only the technology, but the systems, the people, the talent, the processes to drive usage of these technologies. When we talk about tomorrow, the technology exists, but then is how do we scale a hydrogen economy? How do we scale carbon capture and sequestration, biofuels, or this, or using CO2 as feedstock to produce methanol or as a component for road surfaces, for example? So but this is what's happening out there, and the fact is that AspenTech is completely lined up around every one of these areas, including electrification. So think about a use case where you take wind energy to produce electricity and electron. That electron then, in order to store it, because there's not enough demand for that electricity, is then converted into hydrogen by using that electricity to power an electrolyzer to split hydrogen from water. Electrolyzers are a chemical process that is very well known in refining. Eventually, hydrogen is produced that can be converted into ammonia to store it, and when demand for electricity comes back, that ammonia can be converted back to electricity. That journey of that molecules into electrons and back to electrons into molecules and back to electrons can be modeled by Aspen Technology, and this is what a lot of companies are doing with our solution. So this is an opportunity that we believe now exists for AspenTech, and this is what I was explaining. Our products were developed to model molecules for hydrocarbons, refineries, chemical plants. Those same products can model molecules for sustainable fuels, hydrogen, carbon capture and sequestration, biofuels, and it is being done today. But also now we can extend into the electrons. Converting a molecule into an electron or an electron into a molecule. And this is a convergence that is happening around, in all these industries, that we believe enhances the opportunity for AspenTech going forward. So this is just an example, of all of our customers. And frankly, there's thousands of these examples, customers creating billions of dollars, both in profitability but also reducing their carbon, emissions, going forward. So with that, thank you, and I guess we'll do anything? Yeah. Yeah, we've got time for probably a small handful of questions, and that was fantastic. Thank you, Antonio. As you were touching on it there at the tail end of the presentation, it seems like the common theme is obviously complexity tied to the energy transition and sustainability initiatives. There's a lot of room for digitization in those core processes, but how does that also drive new opportunities to leverage software and data as you think about things like intermittency, reliability, kinda new challenges that are created by this ecosystem? Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, the tagline that we use, and it's somewhat of a controversial tagline inside the company, it's technology that loves complexity. And it is because some people think that it should be technology that makes things simpler. And the thing is that it is very complex operating environment, and that complexity creates a lot of opportunity. And the fact is that this energy transition, which is either a transition or an evolution to a new energy system, but there's a greater amount of renewable energy, where you still have to decarbonize the existing energy system, meaning oil, gas, and coal. But all that is creating greater complexities, creating greater opportunity to leverage technology in order to, again, drive profitability. The... I think our customers are also realizing that, in driving profitability, you also drive sustainability, and therefore, how do you leverage all these technologies? The DGM suite has a capability around microgrids that can be very important for refineries, chemical plants, as they introduce renewable energy into their electrical networks. You know, if you've ever flown through the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, that airport is managed, that microgrid, the airport's electrical network is managed using AspenTech's technology. The MBTA system in Boston uses our microgrid technology as well, and there's many more opportunities in that regard. So the incorporation of renewable energy is also creating greater complexity as you look to optimize and drive efficiencies. And this is what, this is opportunity for AspenTech. Sure. And obviously, you touched on the value proposition of, of acquiring some of those Emerson assets to unlock kinda greater capture of those opportunities as well, too. How should we think about the timeline of progression now that we're kinda 2, 3 years in here, transitioning from that integration phase now to actually being able to kinda capitalize, more so on that? Yeah, look, it's been a busy two years. Of course, we've had to do a heavy lift to integrate these two companies and also transform them because they were companies that were selling perpetual licenses. They were really OSI was more of a systems integrator. Great technology, but executed as a systems integrator. So we've had to transform a lot of their processes. We've put in place new organizations. We are through that. Our focus now is drive growth and profitability, and that's what fiscal 25 will be about as we start the year here on July first. But look, we think there's a great opportunity. We think we've positioned ourselves incredibly well across this transition to a new energy system or... Then it's gonna be about execution. Great spend in CapEx, in utilities, still in oil and gas, and in EPCs around sustainability, and that's what we think will drive the company going forward. Perfect. I think that's a great place to, to wrap today. We'll continue the conversation upstairs, but, thank you, Antonio. Appreciate it. Great. Thank you, Dylan. Appreciate it. Thank you, everyone.