ROP - Roper Technologies, Inc.

Operator : Good morning. The Roper Technologies Conference Call will now begin. Today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Zack Moxcey, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Zack Moxcey : Good morning, and thank you all for joining us as we discuss the second quarter financial results for Roper Technologies. Joining me on the call this morning are Neil Hunn, President and Chief Executive Officer; Jason Conley, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Brandon Cross, Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer; and Shannon O'Callaghan, Senior Vice President of Finance. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release announcing our financial results. The press release also includes replay information for today's call. We prepared slides to accompany today's call, which are available through the webcast and are also available on our website. Now if you please turn to Page 2. We begin with our safe harbor statement. During the course of today's call, we will make forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties as described on this page, in our press release and in our SEC filings. You should listen to today's call in the context of that information. And now please turn to Page 3. Today, we will discuss our results primarily on an adjusted non-GAAP basis. For the second quarter, the difference between our GAAP results and adjusted results consists of the following items: amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets, financial impacts associated with our minority investment in Incore. And lastly, cash collected on Outgo's beneficial interest, which is the residual amount owed to Outgo after it sells receivables to a third party and is classified within cash flows from investing activity. Reconciliations can be found in our press release and in the appendix of our presentation on our website. And now if you please turn to Page 4, I'll hand the call over to Neil. After our prepared remarks, we will take questions from our telephone participants. Neil? Neil Hunn : Thank you, Zack, and thanks to everyone for joining us this morning. You can see our agenda on Page 4. So let's get right into it. Next slide, please. As we turn to Page 5, I want to highlight 3 takeaways for today's call. First, we delivered solid results and are raising our outlook for the year. Second, AI momentum continues to build across the enterprise at an accelerating pace. And third, we continue to execute our capital allocation opportunities with our long-standing discipline. Let me double-click each point. First, second quarter results were solid and ahead of expectations. Total revenue grew 9%, organic revenue grew 5%, EBITDA grew 5%, and free cash flow grew 11%. Importantly, enterprise gross retention remained strong consistently in the mid-90s. On that foundation, enterprise software bookings remained solid with core bookings up mid-single digit plus on a TTM basis. At a high level and across the portfolio, Deltek had an encouraging second quarter, but we're not ready to call a turn in the GovCon market. Relative to Neptune, they had better first half performance than originally expected. And finally, at DAT, we're seeing improving freight market conditions for the first time in many years. On the back of this quarter's performance, we're raising our full year DEPS guidance for the second time this year to a range of $22.15 to $22.30 and that is up $0.30 at the midpoint and up $0.80 our original guide in January. In addition, we're raising our full year revenue growth outlook, with total revenue now expected to be north of 8% and organic growth expected to be in 6% range. Second, we continue to build momentum around AI and the automation of tasks and workflows within our markets. During the quarter, our product release cadence accelerated, and I'd like to highlight both the breadth of what we're doing and the vertical market depth of what each of our businesses is delivering on the AI and agentic product front. Since we last spoke, Deltek released agented capabilities across both its GovCon and private sector solutions, including RFP development and month-end financial close. Vertafore released its AI velocity platform with 6 SKUs, which I'll get into more depth and to later. Strata released in beta is AI-enabled financial Decision Intelligence product. Aderant shipped its first generation of agents across collections, billing appeals, talent and time capture. Procare shipped its first of many agentic features Room Runner, which helps daycare operators optimize enrollment strategies. CentralReach deployed its next generation of AI solutions focused on clinical documentation quality and audit readiness. DAT continued the evolution of its ML-based freight match automation capabilities, including its first proactive AI recommendation engine, which services load opportunities to carriers who have not otherwise come across them. And SoftWriters, iTrade, Foundry and ConstructConnect rounded out this quarter's AI and agentic product releases. So I know this was a long list, but that's precisely the point. We continue to see very positive signals from our businesses and their ability to build and ship agentic features and products. Our right to win is ground in the same advantages that have always made our vertical software businesses strong: deep domain expertise, embedded customer workflows, unique data assets, high trust customer relationships and scale distribution. Product velocity is also increasing within our businesses, each company develops AI capabilities close to their customers and their workflows while our AI accelerator team further increases velocity and scales reusable patterns across the portfolio. This model is working very well. Demand is strong, but these products are iterative and in many cases, they change how customers do their work, so the pace of adoption is still developing. What is powerful, though, is that these products will improve with use. As adoption expands, the products get better, knowledge graphs compound and the value to customers increase. That creates a flywheel. More value drives more adoption, more adoption improves the product and the cycle accelerates. So while we're still early in the commercialization curve, we like the progress we're seeing. And third, we continue to execute with the same consistent disciplined capital allocation approach that has defined Roper for years. During the quarter, we repurchased another 3.6 million shares, and we expect to soon receive proceeds from Indicor's divestment of its instrumentation businesses to AMETEK. So let me turn the call over to Jason, so he can walk you through the details of both of these and our financials and balance sheet position. Jason? Jason Conley : Thanks, Neil, and good morning, everyone. I'll first take you through our second quarter financial performance, beginning on Slide 6. At a high level, this was a solid second quarter. We finished above the high end of our DEPS guidance range, and organic growth was slightly above expectations. Revenue of $2.1 billion was up 9%. Organic growth of 5%, and acquisitions contributing 3 points. Organic recurring revenue across our Softwares segments grew 7% in the quarter, consistent with our Q1 performance. Further, we expect organic recurring revenue growth to inflect higher as we move into the second half. EBITDA of $815 million -- was $815 million with EBITDA margin of 38.6%. Core EBITDA margin was down 70 basis points. The reduction was mainly driven by lower margins in our TEP segment, given similar dynamics to Q1, which are: We had higher input costs at Neptune and amidst more reoccurring consumables at NDI and Vertafore. As we move into the second half, we expect margin improvement at Neptune and easy comparisons in the segment. Importantly, in the quarter, core margins across our software segments were down a modest 10 basis points, which includes investment in our AI team. Diluted earnings per share of $5.38 was above our guided range of $5.25 to $5.30 and up 10% over prior year. This outperformance was driven by the combination of solid organic growth and additional buyback activity, which generated $0.03 of accretion in the quarter relative to our guidance. Free cash flow was $447 million, up 11% over prior year. On a trailing 12-month basis, free cash flow is now at $2.6 billion and has compounded at 18% over the past 3 years, 15% adjusted for Section 174. So growth in free cash flow, coupled with share repurchase activity, resulted in free cash flow per share growth of 19% in the quarter. Now if you turn with me to Slide 7, I'll walk you through our financial position and capital deployment. We exited the second quarter at 3.4x net debt to EBITDA, up from 3.1x at the end of Q1, reflecting the capital deployed towards share repurchases in the quarter. We finished with $365 million of cash and $2.9 billion drawn on our $3.5 billion revolver. As Neil mentioned, during the quarter, we repurchased 3.6 million of shares for $1.2 billion, at an average price of approximately $341 per share. That brings our cumulative repurchases to 9 million shares, spending $3.2 billion since this program began. Said differently, we have repurchased over 8% of our shares in 8 months, which gets us back to our 2013 share count position. Also, Indicor announced an agreement to sell its instrumentation businesses to AMETEK, which is expected to close in the second half of this year. As a minority holder in Indicor, we expect gross proceeds of approximately $1.4 billion or an estimated $1.2 billion after tax, which further strengthens our balance sheet and deployment capacity. Of note, the flow control businesses remain in the Indicor portfolio and will provide additional liquidity following a competitive sale process, which is not yet factored into our capacity framework. With good visibility into forward free cash flow and the expected Indicor instrumentation proceeds, we retain more than $5 billion of annualized capacity for capital deployment. We expect M&A activity to break loose later this year and into 2027 and plan to prepare our balance sheet to take advantage of these opportunities. That said, we will remain patient and disciplined and deploy capital to the highest risk-adjusted return investments. With that, I'll turn it back over to Neil to discuss segment performance and our outlook. Neil? Neil Hunn : Thanks, Jason. As we turn to Page 9, let's review our Application Software segment. Revenue grew 8% in total, with organic revenue growth of 5%, slightly better than our expectations. EBITDA margins were 42.8% and core margins declined 20 basis points year-over-year. Organic recurring and reoccurring revenue, which represents about 85% of the segment, continued to grow in the mid-single digit plus range while nonrecurring revenue was down low single digits. Looking across the segment, a couple of themes spike out. First, our SaaS transitions continue to advance meaningfully. Several of our larger businesses made real progress on ground to cloud conversions and on bringing new cloud native products to market. Over time, this should continue to be a positive trend for this segment. And second, as discussed earlier, AI momentum continues to build across the portfolio. Turning to business highlights. Aderant was once again excellent in the quarter. The business continues to win in the market to drive accelerating adoption of its cloud offerings and build momentum with its genetic AI solutions. Deltek was solid in the quarter during [indiscernible] in its private sector solutions. GovCon was decent, and we saw some encouraging signs. That said, it is still too early to call it a trend. Before upgrading our GovCon outlook, we'd like to see the sales pipeline convert consistently over the next few quarters. We do expect improvement over time, supported by the market tailwinds from the OBBB or [indiscernible]. Vertafore delivered another solid quarter with continued ARR growth. More importantly, faster product delivery is turning its AI strategy into tangible customer solutions. It's [indiscernible] strategy targets 5 areas of insurance distribution: digital servicing, smart submissions, accounting automation, producer workflows and business intelligence. It starts with high-volume, labor-intensive work where customer value is immediate, that expands into more complex higher value workflows. Velocity, Vertafore's purpose-built AI platform, enables rapid agent development directly within systems customers already use. Recently launched with 6 initial agent SKUs, it establishes the foundation for continued innovation. Vertafore's high right to win comes from applications that define and run their customers' core workloads. Thousands of customer environments are configured around specific data, products, rules, permissions and processes. This allows agents to operate inside live environments with unique customer-by-customer context to perform real work accurately and securely. Three products demonstrate the strategy's breadth and value. The reconciliation agent ingest carrier statements, matches transactions and direct employees only to exceptions, reducing up to an hour of work to minutes. The submission processing agent converts unstructured e-mails and documents into underwriting ready data, reducing processing time from roughly an hour to about 2 minutes. The Porter Launcher agent converts static PDF applications into digital submission experiences, enabling [ MEAs ] to launch new programs dramatically faster and compete more effectively. These are not features that merely make work faster. They make meaningful portions of the workflow, improving speed and accuracy, increasing capacity, enabling growth without proportional headcount. That deepens Vertafore's customer value and expand this opportunity beyond software spend, into the much larger pool of labor sense. Illumia delivered a strong second quarter with revenue ahead of expectations as it wins share and cross-sells into the combined Seaboard and Transact customer base. Strata also performed well with its AI strategy accelerating faster than anticipated. Procare remains a work in progress. The team is advancing a broader product strategy with Room Runner released strong early usage and more innovation in the pipeline. At the same time, Joe and the team are shoring up the core product, go-to-market execution and implementation capability. And then finally, CentralReach continues to execute at a high level, delivering very strong growth and meaningful margin improvement. As a reminder, CentralReach turns organic next quarter and after 1 year of the business is ahead of our deal model. As I turn to our outlook for application software, we expect organic growth for the second half of the year to meet the mid-single-digit plus range. Please turn to Page 10. Total revenue in our Network Software segment grew 12% and organic revenue grew 4% in the quarter. Organic recurring growth was strong, growing high singles was offset by weaker reoccurring and nonrecurring revenue at MHA and iPipeline. EBITDA margins were 50.9%, down 370 basis points year-over-year, while core margins improved slightly, up 30 basis points. The gap reflects 2 dynamics: the acquisition of SubSplash, a faster growth business with a lower but steadily improving margin profile and our ongoing investment at DAT, particularly Convoy. Turning to the business level highlights. DAT grew nicely in the quarter and continues to execute at high fidelity. We're also seeing encouraging growth in our digital freight marketplace solutions with increasing adoption and engagement. Broader market indicators are improving as well. Carrier additions have increased steadily throughout the year. Spot pricing is strengthening relative to contract rates and carrier rejection rates are rising. We still need to see load volumes improve before becoming fully bullish on the recovery. The 2026 benefit is tracking modestly ahead of our prior expectations, and the indicators remain encouraging as we look towards 2027. ConstructConnect had another solid quarter with continued growth of its AI-based takeoff solution. The business is expanding AI deeper into preconstruction workflow, helping customers reduce manual effort, move faster through project documents and improve decision speed. Foundry continued to deliver year-over-year ARR growth with meaningful AI innovation across SmartRoto and grip tape. SmartRato automates a historically manual part of the visual effects workflow, while Grip tape extends Foundry's position in AI orchestration across production and post-production environments. Subsplash delivered another strong quarter with double-digit software growth, even faster payments growth and meaningful margin expansion. The business also continued to extend AI across its church engagement and giving platform, taking its AI assistant live to all customers. Finally, I joined our SoftWriters team, which provides the core operating system for long-term care pharmacies for a site visit at Allied Script Pharmacy. I spent time understanding AlliedScript's strategic and operational priorities and where SoftWriters can help accelerate the business. Allied Script serves more than 32,000 beds across 150 facilities, so small workflow improvements create significant value. I sat alongside pharmacists processing prescription orders with and without SoftWriters' AI-powered order entry and review solution. Without automation, a new order can require up to 90 seconds of manual entry and review. Our solution reads the prescription, populates information in the existing workflow and lets the pharmacists focus on validation rather than transcription. Processing time falls to about 18 seconds per order, an 80% reduction. The benefit extends beyond lower labor costs. It gives pharmacists and technicians more capacity for quality assurance, clinical review, answering nurses questions, supporting customers and absorbing volume without proportional headcount. That means better patient care, better customer service and a more scalable path to growth. Equally important, the automation is delivered in context at the precise point of work with extremely low latency. SoftWriters derive proprietary data, domain-specific models, dense workflow integration, customer trust and distribution were evident. It showed how our vertical market moats enable differentiated AI that automates meaningful customer work. Order entry is just the beginning of SoftWriters' workflow automation opportunity. Finally, the monetization model is also attractive and in addition to the existing software spend. SoftWriters prices the solution transactionally, directly aligning revenue with orders automated and labor savings delivered. Customers achieve a clear return while SoftWriters participates in the value created with revenue scaling as adoption and transaction volumes grow. Thank you to the AlliedScript team for hosting me and for the partnership. Now let me turn to our outlook for network software. We expect organic growth for the second half of the year to increase versus the first half and be in the mid-single-digit plus range. Now please turn to Page 11, and let's review our TEP segment. Total revenue and organic revenues grew 7%. Results were better than anticipated at Neptune, NDI and Verathon. EBITDA margins were 34.5%, down 220 basis points year-over-year, reflecting the same dynamics discussed last quarter. input cost pressure at Neptune, principally bronze ingot inflation and a mix shift at both NDI and Verathon towards faster-growing consumables, which carry lower gross margins, though notably more durable and reoccurring revenue profiles. Starting with NDI. The business had another very strong quarter, driven by sustained demand for its electromagnetic tracking solutions across cardiac, neurological and orthopedic applications. EP remains a compelling multiyear growth opportunity with procedure volumes increasing, leading OEMs launching new tracking-enabled catheter platforms and NDI uniquely positioned at the sensor layer. Neptune had an encouraging quarter. Revenue declined modestly year-over-year but came in ahead of our expectations as strong mechanical meter volumes and continued growth at UnionLink helped offset the anticipated decline in market unit volumes. UnionLink also continues to strengthen Neptune's position across the broader meter-to-cash workflow through its cloud-based utility billing and customer communication capabilities. Finally, the metering business remains on track to return to growth in the second half. Verathon delivered solid growth driven by strong demand for BFlex and GlideScope single-use offerings. We're also encouraged by the launch of the CFlex single-use cystoscope and BFlex specimen collection system, which further expands Verathon's single-use portfolio. Finally, I want to recognize the teams at CIVCO, FMI and IPA for their excellent work in the second quarter. Each team executed well and contributed to the segment's performance. Turning to our TEP outlook. We expect organic growth for the second half of the year to be in the high singles range and be a bit stronger in Q3. With that, please turn us to Page 13. On this page, let's walk through our increased full year revenue and DEPS guidance as well as our Q3 outlook. For the full year, we're raising adjusted DEPS guidance to a range of $22.15 to $22.30. That represents a $0.30 increase at the midpoint from our prior guide and an $0.80 increase from our original guide. We're also increasing our full year total revenue growth guidance to north of 8% with organic revenue growth expected to be in the 6% area. Please note, this guidance outlook excludes any proceeds from Indicor's divestiture of its instrumentation businesses. For the back half of the year, we expect a tax rate in the 21% area. To reiterate a few key assumptions from our segment commentary, there are some encouraging signs of stabilization at Deltek, but not enough yet to change our outlook. DAT's freight market is improving, and we now expect a modest benefit in '26 with the setup becoming increasingly encouraging for '27. And Neptune's first half performance was stronger than we modeled, contributing to our first half beat. For Q3, we're establishing adjusted DEPS guidance of $5.75 to $5.80. Now please turn with us to Page 14, and we'll open it up for your questions. We'll conclude with the same 3 points with which we started. First, we delivered solid second quarter results and are raising our outlook for the year. Retention remains strong. And based on our year-to-date performance, we're raising full year DEPS guidance for the second time this year. We're also raising our full year revenue growth outlook, both for total and organic revenue. Second, AI momentum continues to accelerate across the enterprise. Our product release cadence accelerated meaningfully in the quarter, and our businesses are shifting Agentic and AI-enabled capabilities into high-value vertical workflows. Though it's still early, and we will continue learning through the back half of the year, the signals are very positive. We have the vertical market knowledge, deeply embedded workflows, unique data advantages, high-trust customer relationships and scale distribution to win in the AI era. Finally, our capital allocation framework remains unchanged. We'll deploy capital wherever we see the greatest opportunity for durable long-term cash flow per share compounding, whether through acquisitions or opportunistic share repurchases. Over the last 8 months, that discipline led us to repurchase approximately $3.2 billion of equity, roughly 9 million shares or a bit more than 8% of shares outstanding, returning the share count to 2013 levels, and we're very pleased by that outcome. Looking ahead, we believe M&A is likely to offer the more attractive long-term compounding opportunity provided assets meet our strategic and risk-adjusted financial criteria. We expect the M&A market to improve over the coming quarters and are cautiously optimistic about deploying $5 billion or more towards acquisitions over the next 12 to 18 months. Given this expected improvement and with leverage currently around 3.4x, near-term capital deployment will favor deleveraging over opportunistic buybacks. We expect to delever quickly through strong second half cash flow and the Indicor proceeds rebuilding capacity to pursue high-quality acquisition candidates. So in closing, the ingredients for accelerating cash flow per share compounding, our most important financial metric, continue to strengthen. Our portfolio is the strongest it has ever been. Organizational velocity is increasing. AI is expanding our addressable markets, and we expect our product innovation to translate into higher growth over time. Our capital deployment capacity and flexibility remain significant differentiators and most importantly, our discipline is unchanged. So with that, we'll open it up to your questions. Operator : Your first question comes from Deane Dray with RBC. Deane Dray : Congrats on all the AI, SKU launches. Neil Hunn : Thank you, Deane. Before I answer your question, I just want to jump in and just say a couple of things, if that's okay, to you personally. Congrats on just a great career and also congrats on stepping away from the day to day. I've come to know you -- we've come to know you for the better part of the last 15 years, lots of conversations, several road shows, and I think the thing that I take away the most from that in respect the most is the way you've done your job. Always fair, objective, principles, including the moments when we didn't see things the same way. So it's pretty amazing. So congrats on that. I also appreciate you introducing me to a few leaders who become friends that I can call friends now. Great -- congrats on a great career and especially congrats on retirement. And I hope you get plenty of time with that family, especially those grandkids. Deane Dray : Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for all those kind words. It's really been my privilege to follow Roper over the years. And yes, going back to the halcyon days of [ Brian ]. So I really appreciate all the help Neil, you and the team have given me and all the insight. I've got a ton of respect for you all, and I wish you continued success. Neil Hunn : Thank you so much. All right, let's get to your questions. So congrats. Deane Dray : I don't know how I pivot to buybacks, but I'm going to. Just the idea here, this is now the second quarter of some sizable buybacks, and I'd really be interested in hearing how you look at buybacks on a capital allocation versus a CRI-accretive deal equivalent what that would need to look like. And I think the key here is on a risk-adjusted basis. But if you could just share that insight, that would be great. Neil Hunn : That's right. Happy to do it. So we always, first of all, look at what we believe will be the best way to compound our cash flow per share over a longer arc, like a 5- to 7-year period of time. We've always looked at it this way, until the last 8 months, the capital allocation mathematically always favored M&A. When you look at the returns, both the time [ 0 ] return, a time [ 5 ] return, whether it's a year 5 EBIT, EBITDA or year 5 ROIC to M&A. But obviously, with the last 12 months or so, 12 to 18 months with the current share price level of Roper in the broader software sector, all of a sudden, buybacks became significantly more attractive. Now looking forward, we expect the private values to mirror those or come down to the public values. We're starting to see some very early signs of that. As we all know, public values are ultimately the gravitational force for all private companies. And when that happens, then the math turns quite interesting, quite accretive, quite more attractive towards M&A versus buyback. And so we'll always sort of judge those 2 between what's best for the long-term cash flow for share compounding. Deane Dray : That's really helpful. And could you just expand on the comment about the pipeline? I think the term was breaking loose, just the expectation on deal flow over the near term. Neil Hunn : Yes. I should also say just on -- there is -- on the last question, we always look at the buyback of our own stock versus an acquisition with a risk premium. We always obviously know ourselves better than anything we could know externally. So we have to sort of be compensated their returns on that. And so we obviously look at that. So we round out that answer. On the -- and now I forgot your second question already. Unknown Executive : Pipeline. Neil Hunn : Pipeline, yes, sorry. So the -- what I would say there is [ Janet ] and her team are having -- they always have a lot of dialogue. The dialogues turn decidedly more constructive over the last couple of months-ish in terms of the sponsors sort of understanding the valuation landscape, they've had 3 or 4 years of DPI pressure, private credit sort of pressure doesn't help their situation with the public values have been here for, like I said, the better part of 9 to 12 months sort of a bounce back. So their hope of a bounce back -- is near-term bounce back is likely not going to happen. And sponsor just coming to grips "the new 15 is yesterday's 25" or whatever the quote is from a couple of sponsors that we've talked to privately. A lot proprietary opportunities right now. Sponsors saying, "Hey, if we can get a deal done, we'll just do something with you on a one-off basis." I think that's a sign of where we are both from as a preferred buyer but also from a macro perspective. So that sort of informs our view of the pipeline. We'll always be disciplined. We'll always be patient. I wouldn't anticipate there's like a massive breakthrough of the pipeline in the next small number of months, but we want to prepare the balance sheet to be completely ready when that time comes. Unknown Executive : I'd also just say in the channel, like, from the investment banking community, we're getting a lot of signals there. And then also those that do market diligence and consultants, their books are filled up right now quite a bit, so it's another signal. Operator : Your next question comes from Terry Tillman with Truist. Terrell Tillman : Neil, jj Jason and Zack, can you all hear me okay? I've had a bad connection. Can you hear me? Neil Hunn : We hear you great. Terrell Tillman : Wonderful. On Vertafore, seems like it is very high value. We do a lot of work in insurtech, and I'd love to kind of double-click on it. I think you all said continued ARR growth. I mean how is the growth compared to the overall software organic, which I think was 5% in the quarter. And then on top of that, I mean, with these 6 agents, have you started to size the potential uplift you could see? And then I had a follow-up. Jason Conley : Yes. So the ARR growth is a little bit higher than the segment. So trending well there. Neil Hunn : Yes, I can take the agentic opportunity. So we've worked with our partners at Bain, Amy and her team have done their own internal work about what the TAM expansion potential is at Vertafore for the agentic work in the 5 areas that we talked about in the prepared remarks, it's a doubling-ish of the market size. Now specific to these 6 agents, it's a distinct minority or a smaller portion of that doubling, but this is just the beginning. I mean this is -- think of the scaffolding and the architecture of the Agentic platform is probably the biggest part of the release here and then the 6 SKUs on top, which means the acceleration of SKUs coming from this point forward should accelerate and we'll get -- we will sort of develop product and launch product to sort of fully cover that 2x market opportunity. And by the way, these are informed guesses. I don't think anybody really knows the complete TAM expansion, but going in and sort of automating some of these tasks and giving our customers that efficiency certainly lets us sort of monetize some of the labor spend. Terrell Tillman : Yes. And then the follow-up is kind of a hard question, unfortunately, but it is kind of -- you said guesses because I agree it is all guesses for all of us. But this kind of clearing event and the timing of it really to take hold, like I know we talked last quarter, Neil, and I'd even mentioned maybe is there some sort of like FTE layer that you have to add? I mean you said scaffolding then the agents. When do you see like the light bulb, the switch flipping where, "Hey, we're going to really run big, large production workloads." Do you think it's the second half of this year? Or just anything on that? Neil Hunn : Yes. I said -- I think we said last quarter and we'll repeat this quarter. We -- as an organization, we just had an amazing set of learnings on how to build these commercial-grade agentic products over the last 12 to 18 months, and that's just compounding. We had just an amazing CTO, CPO event this quarter. It was the largest in-person Roper event we've ever had, a couple of hundred people. And our AI center team, Shane and his team did just an expert job of having a dialogue in this course and training session on how to build like production-grade agentic capabilities, not agent toys, but like truly production grade, and that was incredible. So we've come that learning curve, and we'll continue sort of springboarding sort of that knowledge compounding. Now we're also on a commercialization learning curve. And so how do you -- how do we price, how do we deploy, how do we drive utilization. And we're getting -- we'll certainly get our teams together across Roper to sort of share those learnings Ultimately, whether or not we call them forward deployed engineers or not, I don't know. But definitely, the customer service implementation resources will spend more time with our customers driving utilization, teaching them, going through change management, their workflows. And it's just the rate of adoption across each of our businesses is the large unknown. So will it be material revenue in the second half? It will not be for us this year. But there's momentum building unmistakably inside the organization, and we're excited about that. Operator : Next question comes from Brent Thill with Jefferies. Brent Thill : Just on M&A, I think you had mentioned you're hoping to see the thaw in the cold. But I guess what is -- what's underpinning the confidence in that? Is that just, Hey, it hasn't -- that forever or you're now seeing signs underneath that we can't see that you're just giving a signal that things are in the mix? Like what's different than, "Hey, we just -- we hope it." Neil Hunn : Yes. I think it's similar to what we attempted to say a little bit ago, which is the conversations we're having with sponsors are now real conversations. They understand the valuation world that we live in. They've come to grips with that reality. I would say the sponsors that are multi-industry sponsors come to grips with that a little bit quicker than ones that are specialized in sectors and software sector. As Jason said, the consultants who do a lot of the diligence work are quite busy. The conversation we have with the intermediaries, the bankers, their pipelines are quite busy and quite full. And it's that, that informs us. The signal is there. It's positive, but it's distant, but it takes more than a couple of minutes to prepare the balance sheet to play offense. And so that's what we're doing at the moment. Brent Thill : Okay. And sorry, for the first half of the year, what has been the capital you've deployed... Neil Hunn : Well, outside the buyback, there are 2 small bolt-ons. So in aggregate, about $50 million. Brent Thill : $50 million. Okay. Okay. Great. And then just real quick, Jason, for Deltek, can you just give us a sense of how things are going, what you're seeing into the second half of the year? Jason Conley : Yes. So actually had a good second quarter. We had mentioned a large license deal that we had not put in our guidance that they actually executed on, so it drove a little bit of outperformance in the segment. Pipelines look really strong. I think what Neil mentioned in his prepared remarks is that we're really waiting for some of those conversions to be more of a trend before we call it. Certainly, the contractors, the appropriations are starting to move into the contractor world. I think you'll see some of the public company earnings releases have been good. So we have really good signal that things are going to move in our direction, but we haven't called it yet. Operator : Your next question comes from Joe Giordano with Cowen. Joseph Giordano : Can you like -- I know it probably varies a lot business to business. But when we talk about these AI solutions that you're deploying, can you like help us think about what the hit rate internally is? Like when you're drawing these things up on the whiteboard, like how many ideas is it taking to generate something that's actually getting into production versus like how these businesses operated in like a pre-AI world when you're thinking about improvements? Neil Hunn : Yes. I mean it's really appreciate that question. The hit rate right now is quite high. Now if you think about -- if I step back about really what the -- if you will, the transformation we're going through on the product side is our historical approach to software development being the market leader in each one of our 21 software verticals is sort of methodical and lower risk. In the AI world, you want to go at a frenetic pace and actually work at a little bit higher risk because the cost to develop is much lower. So the risk of a mistake is much lower. So that's been the -- if you really sort of condense the learning over the last 2 years, that is the learning of the organization. And so we're moving at just great pace and the development here has been great. Now the also the learnings have been you start with putting AI chat in your products, not a lot of value there, you can monetize. Then you sort of do lighter weight agents that have lower entropy. And then you get into like real commercial-grade differentiated high-value Agentic workflows, which is what now is being released to the market. But the customer signal that we get is incredible. I think I put on social and LinkedIn and Procare released their first Agentic feature. I mind you, it's not monetized in this particular case, the first one. But within 4 hours released, I think 20% of the customer base engaged with the feature, unheard of engagement in the software landscape that quickly. Strata with their financial decision intelligence tool, they hosted a call and they had more people on the call seeing the demo of this product than when they merged with [ Syntellis ] to give you a sense of the energy in the market. The number of customers in the beta and the early adopter for some of the Vertafore agents, normally, they're capped at a dozen or 2 and Amy left it uncapped and there were more than a couple of hundred. So the early signal is quite high. I just try to give you some -- a couple of data points on this. Now -- but if the hit rate is if we miss on a few, that's okay because we want it -- we've added a little bit of that, if you will, risk given the speed in which we're developing. Joseph Giordano : And then on the M&A side, as you evaluate these companies, like I know the multiples are weird and we're maybe talking about like what multiple should you pay on a trough type result. How willing are you to underwrite inflections in these businesses. So like maybe you're willing to pay a headline sticker price that's way a higher multiple than we normally see from you because you're willing to underwrite something in the business? Like how confident are you in ability to kind of pick that here in this world? Neil Hunn : We've never really -- we've never been the buyer and fixer of an asset ever, at least intentionally, right? We think that we're buying winners that have good momentum behind them, and that's what we're focused on. And increasingly, that will become easier to discern an AI era because the targets will have AI growth and earnings, AI-related growth -- product growth and earnings. And so -- but the concept of a core business that has some headwind attached to it and then somehow we can own it and magically improve it, not really what we do, and I don't see us doing that in the future. We're going to buy the winners and make them better. Operator : Your next question comes from [ Clarke Jeffries ] with Piper Sandler. Unknown Analyst : I wanted to ask kind of 2 interrelated questions around the core margin momentum in the business. Just where do we stand on the quarter-to-quarter movement of the input costs or the mix in TEP? I think core margins were down 70%, but with less contribution from software. So I think that implies that TEP improved from a core margin perspective, but love to get sort of the background on what you're seeing and what you expect for second half? Jason Conley : Sure. I'll take that. So yes, you're right. It's mostly concentrated in TEP. So core margins were down for the enterprise 70 basis points and TEP was down substantially more than that. And it's really the same dynamics that happened in the second quarter are consistent with what happened in the first, which is at Neptune, they had more of a mix of mechanical meters that shipped, and those have carried higher input costs. A big input cost for them is ingot, which has -- ultimately has copper in it. And you've seen what's happened with the price of copper and fulfilling data center demand. So that will -- in the second half, we've got some offset to that will -- on the price side. So we'll have some better offset. And we'll also have more static meter shipments in the second half that don't have as much that input cost. And then on -- and then we just have more mix of reoccurring consumables across our NDI and Verathon business, which we love because that's higher recurring and it's more secular and more predictable, but they do carry a little bit of lower margin. So that's really the primary thing that's going on there. And then that dynamic in the second half just comps a little bit better. So if you look at Q2, it's usually -- it's been our high watermark, but it was a little bit lower this quarter. And then as you roll into the second half, we'll have better comps in the segment. Unknown Analyst : Perfect. And then just on the other side of it with the -- I think you mentioned core margins in software being down based off of the investment in the AI team. Just curious how you expect the investment to play out. I would imagine that it's heavier today in application software versus network software. Do you have insight to when investment might peak? Just any insight on the relative magnitude of investment in the AI team maybe between the segments or the sort of next 12 months? Jason Conley : Yes. I think you're right, right? Most of the, I'd say, activity right now is in application, but all the businesses will have some level of interaction with the AI team. We're sort of -- I think we're at maybe the halfway point of where we think that investment is going to be in terms of headcount, but probably much higher on spend because we've started at the more senior level, and then we'll add some more entry level and more junior folks as we go through. So a lot of that is already in our second quarter base and won't be that much incremental as we go forward. Operator : Your next question comes from Brian Peterson with Raymond James. Brian Peterson : Neil, I know you're addressing a lot of different markets, but I'm curious, in what of those markets do you think you have the earliest appetite or demand from customers for AI solutions? And then maybe what verticals do you think will take a little bit longer to kind of test out those solutions before they step in and buy? Neil Hunn : Yes. It's -- we spent a fair amount of time thinking about this. And I think it's -- maybe try to answer that on like on 2 different axes. I mean there's certainly the industry end market. And I don't know per se if you're in insurance versus health care that the mindset is different in those end markets, one more aggressive, one more conservative. So I don't think that's really the dynamic. I think the other one is we can compare and contrast like CenterReach, which is autism therapy and freight matching automation at DAT. And we have incredible take rates, adoptions in autism therapy and methodical week month-over-month growth rates are quite nice at DAT, but they're not like at escape velocity yet. And why is the difference? And my -- our discernment on that is pretty simple, which is in autism therapy, you have something like 800 million therapy hours demanded, 300 million therapy hours supplied. There's a line outside the door of every clinic for care. And so to the extent that we can deliver AI solutions to give therapists more time to see patients, they're seeing patients, families are getting the services, the clinics revenues and earnings are going up, just everything is aligned. And the DAT example, we can automate the manual -- the dozen or so phone calls to broker a load into no phone calls and do it for a fraction of the labor cost. But there, you're having to do a change management in the workflow about how loads are brokered. There's a human element of that. There's a change management element of that. And then there's going to be flavors of that in between. And like, for instance, Vertafore probably sits somewhere in the middle between those 2. So I think it's going to be more about just the level of human change more than it is like industry that drives sort of the rate of adoption. Brian Peterson : No, that's great color. And maybe just -- I know you mentioned some of your conversations with sponsors. Do you have any sense of where they are in terms of their AI investments? And if those are really ramping up, how do we think about that investment or margin cadence of the targets you would be looking at, assuming we do see a swing of activity in the next couple of quarters? Neil Hunn : Yes. This is probably unfair for us to characterize all sponsors the same. We'll try to do this out. We'll do it without naming names. But there's a small number of sponsors that when the gun went off a couple of years ago with AI, like us, decided to put all of their energy around AI into playing offense, driving product velocity, driving revenue growth, and that was the principal focus. The vast majority of sponsors when the government off said, "Oh, my goodness, I've got an opportunity to take a bunch of cost out of my business, and I'll be able to capitalize that. And now they're realized, "Oh, boy, I've got to get on the product journey because I can't sell a software business unless it has a viable AI sort of product road map in front of it." So as a general matter, I think we're ahead on the product side versus the sponsors, but they're catching up. I mean it's -- they know they have to do the Agentic SKU delivery and show some defensible increase in growth rate to be able to sort of sell a business at a premium price, whatever the definition of premium is going forward. And -- but there -- it's a broad landscape, and you can imagine there's different shades to gray across the sponsors on the AI front. I hope that answered your question. Operator : Your next question comes from Daniel Jester with BMO Capital Markets. Daniel Jester : I think we've maybe talked about this in a couple of different ways, but maybe I'll just double-click on it. I really appreciate the color around SoftWriters and sort of the detailed sort of in the prepared remarks about the opportunity there. And it sounds like there's incremental monetization from -- you had a whole bunch of features that you talked about that have been launched across the portfolio in the prepared remarks as well. Can you help us maybe understand the direct monetization opportunities versus sort of the feature and functionality and quality of life improvements that you're launching? Just as we think about going into next year, how much potential monetization uplift from AI is coming in the pipeline? Neil Hunn : Yes. So maybe I can spend a minute on how we're going to monetize and then I'll try to -- we won't be able to give you a lot of color on the exact '27 monetization amounts -- but I think let me walk through this, and I think it will become evident. So I think we talked about this last quarter, but the principal way we're going to monetize these Agentic SKUs is not going to be the SoftWriters example, which is straight transactional. Our customers have been very clear. They need to have an amount that they can budget and they can sort of understand an envelope -- financial envelope in which they can operate in. So I believe the vast majority of our agentic SKUs will be sold in, if you will, an agent layer, an orchestration layer, the customers will pay a subscription for access to that. And then based on the consumption of the agents and the value that we deliver, they will buy larger tiers of utilization, but it's not going to be straight consumption. Imagine it's going to be stair step consumption. That will be the majority of the way that we monetize. There'll be a few businesses, DAT SoftWriters that already have transactional pricing for the core of what they do that will transactionally price to AI solutions. And then a couple, the most notable will be Deltek is they're piling the majority of their AI agentic features into their cloud product, and they will sort of monetize it on the uplift of their on-premise to the cloud and drive pricing -- sort of additional pricing in the lift and shift. So based on some of the questions that have already been asked today, the big X factor, and we're just going to call it as we see it, is what's the rate of adoption at the customer level, right? We have the products. We're going to have more products in 3 months and more products in 6 months. And that we're on that train, and we're excited by that velocity. But what's the pace of adoption at the customer level? That's the unknown. And so until we get clear signal on that, we have to be unfortunately vague on the magnitude of impact in the near term. Daniel Jester : No, that's really helpful context. I appreciate all that color. And then maybe just as my follow-up, I think in the prepared remarks, you talked about sort of ground to cloud conversions starting to improving. I guess maybe can we just spend a moment, I guess, why do you think that this is improving? And I guess, the confidence level that we should continue to see that improving for the rest of the year into next year. Jason Conley : Sure, Dan. I can take that. So yes, I think we're seeing it -- we have seen it for a few years now at Aderant, and it's picked up velocity there. So that's a legal end market, and we started with some of the smaller firms and now we're starting to move into some of the larger firms, which is encouraging. our Power Plant business has moved their tax solution into the cloud, and we're getting great adoption there. And now they're moving their core accounting -- tax accounting module into the cloud or suite into the cloud, and the adoption is picking up there. And then lastly, as Neil talked about, at Deltek, they're our largest maintenance base today. Putting new features into the cloud is certainly going to increase that adoption and they actually just end of life on their point solution in the GovCon space, which they're going to only go back on that. So they've made -- they'declared that the customers are going to move into the cloud, and that will be a big sort of lift for us over the next 5 years or so. Operator : Your next question comes from Dylan Becker with William Blair. Dylan Becker : Neil, maybe for you, obviously, a lot of conversation around AI and agents and how that's kind of TAM expansive as you go into the labor segment. But maybe wondering on the vertical approach, right, how this validates not only as the workflow system, your ability to identify those opportunities to expand the scope, but also validate the ROI and maybe improve the attach, right, so to draw against that expanded TAM, if that makes sense? And maybe adjacently, right, like why customers would buy from you versus somebody else with an agent as you are kind of that workflow orchestration layer? Neil Hunn : I'll try to attack all of that. Hold me accountable if I fall short. So the ROIs, going back to the earlier question about the hit rate, the ROIs are clear and demonstrable. I mean it's -- I think I said it some of the cases in the Vertafore going from an hour to minutes, you have people that spend hours a day doing tasks and now take 30 minutes. And so it's very, very clear about the value that the customer receives or $100 to $200 to broker load and we charge a fraction of that or it's a very hard, very easy to identify ROI. So we're quite bullish by that, and that's why the hit rate early on and the signals are quite positive. So why us is a question that we spend a lot of time on, and we're -- the signal here is just getting clearer and clearer and clearer. It matters a lot. I mean, it's the classic moat framework, but it matters a lot when you have a system of record position, which is the most of what we do, you have the data, but importantly, you have the workflow depth. So think about that soft writers example. Like, yes, we know how to validate a pharmacy entry, order entry. There's the AI tool to do that, but delivering it precisely in the workflow with no latency is incredibly important. There are the effects whereas we -- there's a learning curve and a network effect, if you have a flywheel effect in all these solutions as we get feedback, the models get better, the prompts get better, the result gets better. And so it more use -- gets more use. So there's a bit of a network effect there. I think 18 of our 21 software businesses are operating in a regulated end market. So there's a regulatory burden that is -- that sort of then leads into like a very high level of customer trust. Candidly, like why a lot of vertical market software exists is because of you have end markets that are different for some reason, oftentimes from a regulated point of view, which makes trust. And then let's just not forget about distribution. I mean it's a huge deal when you can release a feature or a product and you have a customer base that is sort of asking for that. They didn't even know they needed it and they see it like, "Oh, I need that right now," and so all of that comes together about why AI is a winning solution in these vertical markets. And we have just a high degree of -- a high and increasing level of confidence in that. Dylan Becker : Perfect. That's really helpful. And maybe, Jason, just a quick one for you as well, too, as we kind of think about the outlook, right? We had a strong first half of the year. We're seeing a slight kind of acceleration and improvement in the second half. I guess, given a lot of kind of the Agentic opportunity we're talking about, I know it's not immediately monetizable, but probably improving buyer sentiment. I guess, how would you attribute or weight strength in the first half, kind of the mechanics of normalization in some of those larger businesses versus maybe that incremental improving sentiment, if you will, kind of across those 3 buckets as we think about the outlook for the balance of the year? Jason Conley : Yes. I mean, obviously, we had a good first half. TEP outperformed the second quarter and most of our races has been based on the confidence of the first half. I think the second half is a lot of mechanics as we've talked about before, with Central Reach and SubSplash turning organic. And so we haven't really baked in anything meaningful for AI above what the businesses are delivering today. And so that's more of plan for '27 at this point. Operator : Your next question comes from Joe Vruwink with Baird. Joseph Vruwink : I'll just do one. But talking about the organic recurring software, I think it was up 7% in the quarter. You then have reoccurring down 2% and nonrecurring down 4%. I guess, one, how did the latter 2 compare to expectations? And then two, given some of the early reports in software have maybe alluded to like deal timing issues around license transactions. Are you seeing anything pop up there that is at all a leading indicator of demand interest ahead of the second half? Jason Conley : Sure, I can take that. So in application general, yes, nonrecurring was down a little bit. We expected that. Actually, I thought it was going to be a little bit worse because we didn't have the Deltek large license deal baked in. That was just really timing between PowerPlan and others around license and service activity. So nothing to really call out there in our network recurring was down a little bit at our AFA business. So on the call, just more large customers with lower unit economics, and that actually hits the revenue line. So really, that was the only 2 things to call out. And then actually, iPipeline also in the network segment had some service timing. But -- so overall, though, I would just say that bookings continue to look favorable. We were up. We had a tough comp on the second quarter of last year, but we're still up on a TTM basis, mid-single-digit plus. So pipelines look really strong. I think we'd like to see -- we would expect to see that number creep up in terms of TTM bookings as we move into the second half of the year. So the environment has been good for us in terms of commercial activity. Neil Hunn : And just to spike one thing, Jason said on the deal -- on the services timing, this is booked deals, and it was pushing up deliveries of deals versus bookings that pushed. Operator : Your next question comes from George Kurosawa with Citi. George Michael Kurosawa : A lot of discussion in the industry about rising AI costs, token budgets kind of swelling, anecdotes of token maxing. Maybe just when I think about your position, it seems like I'm curious if there's a part of the value prop if you think about the portfolio of businesses that is built around or emerging around the more efficient deployment of AI. And then, Jason, maybe just your approach to managing AI costs and governing those internally. Jason Conley : Sure. So yes, obviously, spend increased for us, just like everyone else. We're up about -- on an annualized basis, about 3x since January. We've been really pushing -- we think what's going to go up by the end of the year, by the way. I think we've been pushing adoption at the enterprise level and getting the business to fully move to agentic coding, and we're in the early days of that. I will say we had our CFO Summit a couple of months ago and all of us were talking about that. We've been sharing a lot of best practices and tools around controlling spend, be it gateways or auto routing or reporting controls. So that's fully in swing. I think the good news, it's kind of a hallmark of our model is that the businesses are driving local ownership, right, around balancing speed with control. And so that's sort of how we've managed it. In terms of how it gets into the product, I mean, I think we use a lot of the -- we don't have to use the frontier models in our product. We're using some of the lower-level tools to do that. I mean you don't always have to use AI in every case. By the way, you can codify certain rules and don't have to continue to ping and do calls when you're spooling up the agents. So overall, we're obviously mindful of it, but I think we're in a good spot there in terms of managing the token spend. George Michael Kurosawa : Okay. Great. And then I did also want to ask about Aderant. It seems like the business has continued to see good momentum. The legal tech space is rapidly evolving, a lot of fast-growing privates in the space, maybe not directly competing with Aderant, but at least in the same world. The hourly billings model itself seems to be maybe under some level of scrutiny. Just how do you feel that business is positioned over the long term and kind of the durability of momentum there? Neil Hunn : Yes. We -- the Aderant business is just awesome. Just so everybody frames, a lot of what you've talked about is sort of in the practice of law. the Harvey and Lagoras and Anthropic of the world about how you sort of make the practice law more efficient. Aderant is all about the business of law. So we're the ERP billing collection, cash cycle, time capture, all of that. And it's just been a great business. since we own the business, the market share has gone from like 35% to 65%. The growth rates tripled. It's just been a great business for us. In terms of billing, yes, I mean, we -- there was -- we did a tuck-in last year, ProPricer at Aderant, which is specifically leaning into how do you help law firms think about strategically changing their pricing models to be more fixed fee or fixed fee with some overages, et cetera. It still has pretty low uptake across -- not ProPricer, just that pricing model, relatively low uptake across the industry. But you can see that happening in certain situations and Aderant that's a business of law question that we will do -- sorry, virtual price [ VPD ], sorry, I gave the wrong answer, wrong deal we did there. But we're excited by that opportunity to partner with our customers in that regard as this market evolves. A lot of the business, the practice-law leader folks, by the way, very much want to partner with us because we're the one that have the matter sort of number and matter details and they need to know what matter their AI solutions are working in so that they can be in the system the right way. So we partner with those folks as appropriate. Operator : Your next question comes from Josh Tilton with Wolfe Research. Joshua Tilton : I'll keep it to one given the time. I guess if we step back from like a high-level perspective, it felt like we came into the year with an outlook for the year that had some conservatism in it for the different things going on with Deltek, DAT and Neptune. We're halfway through the year. The full year guide is going up a little bit. It sounds like there are signs of improvement in all 3 of those businesses. Can you just help us understand what, if any, conservatism is left in the guide? Did anything about how you're being conservative change regarding these 3 businesses? How do we just reconcile or understand full year guidance going up for the year, but also where you're still being prudent and conservative in your outlook for those 3 businesses that I mentioned? Neil Hunn : Yes. I mean I'll take a crack at that and then ask Jason if he wants to add any color. So just to reiterate what's already been said, it was a lot of the increase is sort of in the bank. It's first half doing better than we thought. And then there's the mechanics in the second half of turning organic and then sort of easier comps, especially in the third quarter at TEP. And then we have DAT doing a little bit better. So that's -- those are the good things. But there's still some range of outcome here that we want to remain prudent in the outlook so that we can finish the year with strength. Operator : Your next question comes from Ken Wong with Oppenheimer. Hoi-Fung Wong : I'll just ask one as well. You talked about DAT market improvement. Is that something baked into the guide in the back half? And then any thoughts on the freight broker liabilities ruling and how that might impact the business? Neil Hunn : Ken, yes, so we -- the way the DAT's business works, as you know, it's main on the carrier front, it's monthly subscriptions. So we've seen good progress in the first half. That will continue -- we think that will continue into the second half, not baking in a massive inflection, have just continued slight improvement. And how that works sort of snowballs and then that will roll over into '27? So playing more for '27 growth there, but certainly have some of that baked into the second half in [indiscernible]. Jason Conley : And on the [ Montgomery Scots ] broker liability case, a couple of things on that. The punchline is, we think this is a good thing for us in that. What happened -- first of all, what's happened is a bunch of state laws on this basically got harmonized at the federal level. So at least we know there's one set of rules in which to play by now, which is good. And then what this really does is put more emphasis on the brokers to vet the carriers, which is precisely what Convoy and DAT does extremely well. This goes into the whole fraud situation from a year ago. And so this is -- we're part of the solution here, and we're encouraged that we get one set of rules to play with and now will be the part of a solution that everybody is focused on. Operator : This concludes our question-and-answer session. We will now return to Zack Moxcey for any closing remarks. Zack Moxcey : Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with you during our next earnings call. Operator : The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.