Tyler Technologies, Inc. (TYL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Wonderful. Look, I'm Dave Chen of Morgan Stanley and really, really happy to have Brian Miller, Chief Financial Officer of Tyler Technologies.

Good to be here.

Yes. So, this is our third time coming to Morgan Stanley. But maybe for those of you that are New York to be Tyler story just give us kind of a brief overview of the company and the solutions in the market.

Sure. Tyler is a vertical software company focused exclusively on the public sector market. So everything we do is for public sector. We take a pretty broad view of public sector. So we serve all levels of government from federal to state to local, but with a major focus on local governments. And we have a very wide range of products, really back-office software that runs essential functions of government. So things like ERP systems, property tax systems, courts and justice, public safety, 911 systems, licensing and permitting, school bus transportation. So really kind of anything, a city, county, school district and then on up to state and federal levels would use to run essential functions of government. We're a little north of $2 billion, around $2.3 billion in revenues this year. And it's really -- as you can imagine, the public sector market is a pretty steady market, pretty stable market. So we have many years of really nicely compounding growth at a nice level, generate a lot of cash and just kind of on the back end of a cloud transition. So we're coming through that. So this isn't last year was sort of a pivotal year in our cloud transition. This is the year where we're starting to show sort of turning from a headwind into a tailwind. So we're seeing really good. In '24, we saw really good margin expansion and cash flow growth and continuing that on into this year.

You talked about a company with staying power relative to your customer segment. One of my favorite things just give me a little bit the founding story of Tyler. A lot of people do not realize where you came from.

Yes, Tyler has got a bit of a history that's kind of interesting. So Tyler has been a public company. Next year will be our 60th year as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange. So we're actually one of the oldest listed companies on the New York Stock Exchange. But Tyler was started in the mid-60s as an industrial conglomerate and sort of the classic '70s, '80s industrial conglomerate, bought and sold a lot of different kinds of businesses that the core holding with a company called Tyler Pipe, which was an iron pipe foundry that made sewer pipe in Tyler, Texas. And the metal buildings company, explosives company, military shipbuilding, so all those kinds of things. And then when conglomerates fell out of favor in the '90s, early '90s, Tyler changed directions, spun off, sold the parts that were worth more than the whole and then looked around for kind of something to do with the business and to redirect it and focus on this government software space is a space that was then and still is today very, very fragmented, served historically by a lot of niche players, a lot of local companies that serve a narrow area of government, and that still is sort of the predominant kinds of companies in the space. So Tyler focused on -- put together a plan to initially sort of roll up some of those companies, but bring together complementary companies and build a portfolio of products serving kind of all the major areas of at the time, local government and with a large geographic coverage. And I joined the company just as that was starting in 1997. And so since then -- my first year, our market cap was -- our revenues were about $15 million and our market cap was about $50 million. And so we've had a nice run from then.

Phenomenal. So yes, so you mentioned a number of different areas of public admin, public safety, health, K-12. So just give us a sense for where you came from in terms of some of the core strength of the company and then like where you're going?

Yes. So our biggest product areas in public admin, ERP, licensing and permitting and utility billing, those sorts of things. Everybody has an ERP system, every city county, school district, agency. So it's a really broad market. We have a lot of strength really from not the very lowest tier, but sort of the lower tiers all the way up to not quite the very top tier, but really strong presence in the mid-market. Courts & Justice is our strongest, I guess, from a competitive standpoint, our most dominant product. We have about 55% to 60% of the courts in the U.S. use our case management system. Property tax and appraisal, we also have a very, very strong market position there. And then as we've made acquisitions or have built products, we've expanded around these core flagship products. So in the court space, for example, we have a probation system, a prosecutor system, a jury system and a jail system. So we're able to leverage the customer base to continue to broaden our relationships and sell more products. And public safety, for example, came from an acquisition, and that's an area that's growing really nicely for us with 911 systems and police, fire and ambulance systems. And then expanded into the state market really through the acquisition of NIC in 2021, which got us both some deep state relationships that we can now cross-sell Tyler software products into but also got us a lot of expertise and a really robust payments platform for government that we're now expanding that we've deeply integrated with our software products, and we're selling it into our local government software customer base. So a lot of cross-sell opportunities there and a lot of growth in the transaction side of the business.

That's great. Thank you. Now a lot of the tariffs that you just mentioned, let's kind of get the question out of the way. We've obviously been on lots of investors' minds in terms of the focus by the DOGE department on potential government cuts. And -- I know exactly just get it out of the way. So yes, so just impact on your business one way or another.

Yes. I mean short answer is we see DOGE and more broadly, the focus on government efficiency as a positive and an opportunity for us. Just to sort of frame those specifically, we're only about 5% federal in terms of our revenues. And most of that is addressed with an application platform that automates generally essential functions like background checks and security clearances or EOC claims. So relatively small federal direct exposure. At the state level, we are primarily transaction based. So most of the is there come from -- are generated not out of the state budget, but from transaction fees or convenience fees that users pay to renew a driver's license or they're a vehicle registration. And then at the local level, where the bulk of our software business is the products we provide are really automate essential functions. So they're not things that are -- they're very high in budget priorities. So even if DOGE ultimately results in less funding down. It's a long way to trickle down to local governments, but the kinds of things we are pretty much essential. We're about 85% recurring revenues as well, either maintenance or SaaS fees from our installed systems and transaction fees. So we don't really see impact either currently or a thread DOGE, but we really do see an opportunity from just an increased awareness around government efficiency and a different way of governments looking at it. We've talked about for a long time that the key driver of people buying a system from us is that their old system is at end of life. And that generally means it's 20, 25 years old, not 6 or 7 years old government because they don't have competition. They're not really ROI driven. That's not the way they've historically looked at by software, and they don't like change. So they tend to use these systems until they're just about to die and then replacing them as kind of a nondiscretionary decision. But it creates a market that's really hard to accelerate them, but has a lot of steady demand. And we've often been frustrated because replacing a 20- or 30-year-old system with new technology generally has a very strong ROI and creates all kinds of efficiencies. You replace a paper-based system with a totally paperless electronic court system or you provide citizen self-service and online access so people can do things online instead of going down to the DMV or calling the tax office to get something done. And those have an ROI, but historically, governments haven't really looked at buying software that way, and they've just waited until they had to. So we believe that to the extent there's a greater focus on efficiencies and governments look at technology maybe through more of an ROI lens or an efficiency lens, that the story is pretty compelling and that we believe we'll see sooner adoption of new technology, people not waiting another 10 years until the system dies, but understanding the advantages they can get. And I think -- I mean, if you look at the DOGE Charter, it talks about technology and upgrading software. Again, we don't do a lot at the federal government, but that we're starting to see state does and certainly more discussion around efficiency at the local government level because governments have always had -- at any level, have always had this kind of common theme of needing to do more with less. Even in a great economy and a robust budget environment, they never have enough money to do everything they want to. So technology is really ultimately the way they get that done.

Okay. All right. So the -- it's 95% state and local and then AI and your solutions can actually drive efficiency. What about the amount of funding that any state or local get from the federal side?

Yes. From the -- at the state level, I think about on average, a little north of 30% of their revenues come from some sort of federal funding. And again, our business at the state level is mostly self-funded. So it's not a line item in their budget. But about a 30-ish percent comes from federal. You go on down to the county level, the next level down, it's, I think, high 20s percent that comes from state governments. They don't get much directly from the federal government, but from the state government. And then you go all the way down to the local government level, and it's about 14% from the state government. So by the time federal funds trickles down, it's not a big part. It's mostly locally generated revenues, taxes, property taxes being the biggest, licensing and permitting, local fees, utility bills, fines traffic tickets, that kind of stuff are the kinds of things that pay for things they get from Tyler generally.

Yes. I'm just looking forward just what's driving the business? You already mentioned focus on efficiency as one, you mentioned just moving from manual paper-based processes. Any other kind of key drivers back in COVID, we were talking about like ARPA funding for example.

Yes. The federal stimulus was a tailwind or is continuing to be a tailwind. They've got until the end of 2026 to spend the funds. It has not been a big, big windfall. I mean I think it's provided a really maybe a good backstop or confidence in their budgets for local governments during a time when they might have been otherwise concerned about recession or the hangover from COVID. But generally, the economic backdrop has been pretty good, especially at the local level. The budgets have been really strong and the stimulus money ARPA has supplemented that. But it's been a tailwind, but not a big driver. And it's -- we've enjoyed really good growth over the last couple of years, but we've commented about in the last few quarters and again, in the fourth quarter we just reported a couple of weeks ago that the demand level still is very stable at these elevated levels. So the number of RFPs we're seeing, the number of demos we're doing, all remain very constant. So there is kind of a common theme of digital modernization even before DOGE. And then there's this underlying driver of just old systems keep getting older and keep getting replaced. And for Tyler's growth, as we look to expand our win rates and continue to grow our market share and capture more of those new logos that are in the market and sell more systems to existing customers, cross-sell and upsell is really important. So we've got 40,000 installations of products across 14,000 different discrete jurisdictions. So the average customer has 2 or 3 products from us and could have 8 or 10 products from us. So continuing to leverage that customer base that has taken decades to accumulate and to be able to sort of take advantage of that competitive advantage from those relationships and build on that. And we're seeing a lot of success with that.

Okay. All right. AI has been a big theme for Tyler over the last couple of years. So give us a sense for where are you on that journey? Are you ready to kind of sell AI-specific modules? I know you've made some acquisitions. You might be making some announcements at Investor Day. So just give us a sense for where you are...

Yes, we've got -- it's sort of mixed. And in general, government especially local government doesn't want to be the first with anything. And so they're not, to date, really out there just saying, please give me some AI. They're curious. There -- everybody hears about it. Everybody hears about all these great things. They're also cautious and want to understand it better, and we've been trying to help our customers understand how it can make them more efficient and help them deal with some of their challenges. We have investments going on. We're trying to do those in a very -- there's kind of 2 ways looking at both with our products and internal use. But with our products, we're trying to be very thoughtful about it. We've been spending time prioritizing where we can have the biggest impact on our products and how we can best monetize it and trying to make sure that we can leverage development efforts across multiple products and not duplicate the same kind of efforts. And we've made -- we've done a lot of that in the last year or so. And we've said that by the end of this year, all of our flagship products will have an AI story in their road map. Some of them already have features or AI functions built in. Some of those are under development now, but we'll be able to tell a good AI story around all of our products. And at our user conference coming up in May, we'll be talking a lot about that story to our customers. We -- as you said, we did 3 acquisitions in 2023, smallish acquisitions, but all of those had AI capabilities that they brought to us. And they're really kind of great examples of the kinds of things that AI can bring to our products. There's sort of 3 focuses. One is around decision-making. So providing better data and insights and analytics so the government leaders can make better decisions. One is around -- more around citizen engagement and making it easier for citizens to access government, negotiate government services and take advantage of things available to them. So for example, we have -- last year, we put into place the state of Indiana's first AI project was for a resident engagement portal. So you can go to the portal that we manage and say, I want to start a beauty parlor. So what do I need to do? And it will help you figure out where you need to go rather than calling up a lot of government offices. That's cool. And then the last one is really about productivity. So around automating things like data entry or information retrieval. And that's really where the big benefit. Governments do a lot of repetitive things. So for example, we have -- one of the acquisitions we did was in the court space. It was a company that was a partner of ours. We're the leading provider of court case management systems. Documents come into the courts electronically through an e-filing system that we provide. They remain electronic through the life of the case. But at some point, when the lawyer files a lawsuit, that document comes to the court and a clerk has to sit there and create a case file. So set it up in the system. And so they have to look at the document and say, okay, here's the plaintiff, here's the defendant and create that case. With our solution, that's all automated. AI reads the document, figures out what all those pieces of data are and populates the case file. So then those court resources are freed up to do things that are more productive. And so it's got a direct cost benefit. It's very easy to see the value to that and helps our courts deal with the shortages of people that they already have.

So there will be probably a combination of adding AI across probably, as you said, but also you will be charging extra for certain AI capabilities.

Yes. So like this court document system, Dallas County is one of our bigger courts customers, and they signed an add-on agreement for about $600,000 a year ARR. But it saves several heads. And and they can keep growing and the system will keep managing that. So yes, it's something that we charge for, but it also makes our products stickier and actually more competitive.

Level set us on the -- just the cloud transition for the company. When did you start just top line metrics for how we should track it and how is it going?

Sure. We started a long time ago. It's been very gradual, which has been good that we were able to sort of gradually migrate sort of new business to the cloud. Historically, we were an on-prem maintenance and license business. And then for a number of years, we were a hybrid model. So we offered our products either on-prem with a license model or in the cloud, which is really a hosted model at our data -- one of our data centers paid for with a subscription. And very gradually, a little bit more each year, customers -- and we really didn't try to push people one way or another. We let customers decide and very gradually, more of them chose cloud. But like with most things with government, it was a very slow shift. And in 2019, we really changed focus and said we are cloud first. We have a preference to be in the cloud. We're incenting salespeople to prioritize cloud sales, really started pushing it more with customers and the market started to be much more open to it. And so 2019 was the first year that half of our new business was cloud. And since then, this last quarter, 97% of our new business was cloud. So in the new business market, new logos were pretty much all cloud. There's only a couple of products where we sell licenses at all, and those are changing pretty fast as well. And then we have this huge base of on-prem customers that we want to migrate to the cloud and have been sort of gradually doing that, but we've started to accelerate that as well. Also in 2019, we entered -- we just said we don't want to scale data centers and be in the data center business. So we entered into our first partnership with AWS to be our primary public cloud provider. We just renewed that at the beginning of last year. It's been a really, really good relationship. Last year, we were actually named AWS as state and local government Partner of the Year. And we've had a really good experience with migrating customers out of our data centers and bringing new customers into the AWS world. We closed one of our data centers last year and the second one -- second and last one will close at the end of this year. So today, the number of flips or migrations of on-premise customers is accelerating and the average size is accelerating. Our current on-prem customer base still is kind of heavily weighted towards large customers that are kind of slower to move. But we think that the average size of flips and the number of flips will increase each year over the next 3 or 4 years. The '27, '28 will be kind of the peak period for migrations. We've said by 2030, we expect that more than 80% of our client base will move to the cloud, and we're on track or maybe slightly ahead of track to achieve that. But today, if you look at the whole mix of our business, if you say we're all your customers by dollars sort of on a SaaS equivalent basis, we're about 45% in the cloud today and about 55% that are still on-prem. So that's the aggregate. So that pace is continuing to move. It's a little bit different for each product, but seeing really good progress in terms of the flips and the momentum around that. We get about an average of a 1.7 to 1.8x uplift in revenue when a client moves from maintenance to SaaS. And we also have upsell opportunities to try to bring more products into their portfolio.

Any particular vertical that's faster to move or others are a little more [indiscernible].

Well, I think the slowest to move has been public safety. So for a long time, public safety, which is kind of 911 systems, at least fire and ambulance systems, they didn't -- weren't fully -- didn't fully trust being in the cloud with what are obviously really essential systems. Broadband has gotten a lot better, FirstNet networks. There's a lot more success stories now. So I think they're a lot more comfortable. And that in the last year, 1.5 years has shifted dramatically from being like almost no new business in the cloud to almost all of our new business.

Okay. That's got to be one of the fastest.

So that's kind of the fastest move ERP, which is our biggest customer base, just how it continues to go way and move. Courts, we have a lot of really big customers. We have 8 of the 10 largest counties in the country. We have state-wide on-prem court systems. And so those have been a little slower to move. We just moved the first statewide system, and we expect we'll see some more follow-on board before too long.

Okay. What about -- you mentioned the move. So give us a sense on where you are from a time line perspective and then maybe just the impact on the income statement.

Yes. So as I said, we formally ran our own data centers and kind of changed directions in 2019. Clearly, we couldn't scale at the same rate to have all of our customers in the cloud and have the kinds of backups that we needed and also to continue the kinds of investments you need to make around security. And the public cloud market got a lot more competitive. And so we've had a great relationship with AWS. Initially, when we started to move, it was sort of cost neutral and now it's significantly less expensive than we were able to do it ourselves. It's all kind of volume driven. So the more capacity we buy from AWS, the cheaper the unit costs get. And as I said, we had 2 data centers. The first one closed at the end of 2024, the second one or middle of 2024. The second one closes at the end of 2025. Until we close that second data center, we have what we call bubble costs. So we have a lot of duplicate costs. So a lot of the costs are fixed costs. And so as we move customers out to AWS, we start paying AWS, but we don't really shed a lot of the cost until we close it. So there'll be more of a margin uplift that we'll see starting in '26 when that's behind us. But that's gone very well in terms of -- we've been right on schedule. We laid out the schedule about 3 years ago and have stuck to it pretty well. So that, combined with the optimization of our products. So a lot of our flagship products were originally developed to be deployed on-prem. And so they're kind of resource heavy in terms of -- when you put them in the cloud, they're not super efficient. And so we've been investing in optimizing those products so that they run more efficiently in the cloud in general and particularly taking advantage of AWS features. And so as we've now released most of those cloud optimized versions, that's also had a meaningful impact on our margins as they're a lot cheaper to host. And so that -- as we start to accelerate the pace of flipping on-prem customers to the cloud, that also gives us more of a benefit. So those things kind of all fit together as we drive towards getting more and more of our customers migrated over.

Great. One of the most exciting parts of your business, you hinted at was your NIC acquisition in 2021. It's been a few years now. I kind of feel like last 2 years, that's all we talk about with NIC. But I assume the integration is done, but just like how are we doing on payments cross-sell across the organization.

Yes. Yes, it's not completely done, but a lot of it is behind us. We -- NIC was the first time -- only time we've acquired another public company. It was by far the largest acquisition we've ever done at $2.3 billion. It was roughly 20% our size and really very complementary. So they primarily are transaction-based, providing payment services and facilitating transactions, building interfaces and portals to these big back-end systems at the state level, where we were mostly local and we were mostly the back-end software. So created a lot of cross-sell opportunities besides it just being a good business that we were able to buy at a reasonable valuation, but very complementary. So cross-sell opportunities to sell Tyler products, software products that work at the state level, but where Tyler really didn't have relationships there. We didn't have sales organizations built out at the state level. So it just hadn't been Tyler's focus in the past, even though there were opportunities there. And then we had a desire to continue to capture more transactional revenue around Tyler systems that facilitate payments. So actually doing that payment processing, we have a lot of systems like utility billing or traffic courts or licensing and permitting or property taxes that take payments in, but we didn't actually do that payment processing, and we partnered with third parties. So now we have this really robust payment engine that we have now integrated into each of those software products. So the system that produces the bill is the same system that processes the payment. It provides advantages to the customer like automated reconciliations and things that they're willing to pay more for. And so we get better margins than sort of commoditized payment margins. And we're sort of still in the early days of selling that into our customer base, but we did almost 1,995 new payments customers last year. And like I said, we're still in the kind of early stages of building that out of pushing that through our customer base and selling it with new deals. And then also having success in selling Tyler products into the state government level. So things like our licensing and permitting system. I think we've had NIC states that have -- as they legalize marijuana, they need a system to -- a regulatory system to manage all of that. And we've been able to sell our cannabis regulatory system into those state governments without a competitive process through the NIC contracts, which was kind of what we envisioned when we signed the deal. To kind of take that up another level, we just announced that we're putting in place a new sales function that is focused exclusively on state governments to sort of bridge that gap between the Tyler sales -- the Tyler product sales organizations and the NIC state organizations. So we have a new team of about 15 state-focused sales executives that will be in place in the first part of this year.

Yes, that's what sounds super interesting. Like when you say 95% is state and local, most of that is local?

Most of it is local from a software perspective.

Yes. So how should we think about, Tyler, you mentioned the direct effort to go after the state opportunity with specific sellers like over the several years. What do you think that balance?

Yes. That's where it will shake out. But definitely, from a software perspective, there'll be -- the mix will definitely shift more. We'll grow -- I think we'll grow the state business probably. At least as fast or maybe faster is going to be a bigger part of the mix, and we have done a couple of smaller acquisitions. We bought a company in the outdoor recreation space. It's mostly focused on the state market. And we've had a lot of success with that. We did our biggest software deal ever with the California state parks here in the state of California. Really really interesting because we -- it's all the software that runs all the state parks, the campground reservations, the retail, everything to do with that, take a tour of the Hearst Castle and the point-of-sale system. But it's all funded because California has budget challenges. It's all funded through transactions. So they're not paying us SaaS fees. We're able to get $5 when you offer that as a fee on the campground reservation or it's all funded by transaction fees. So it's a model that played well with the state, but we've also sold that on a SaaS basis to a number of other states. I think last quarter, we announced South Carolina as a new customer for the Outdoor Recreation suite. So we have -- and I think we'll continue in our M&A program, I think we'll look for some things that are more state-focused as well to build out our portfolio there.

Right. We only have like maybe 2.5 minutes left. I want to see if we have any questions from the audience. And if we could just bring the mic over. And we have one over here. Great.

Just real quickly, could you help me understand how the company is differentiated from its customers, both the big and the small. How -- it's competitors.

Competitors. Well, generally, we compete -- the one area we compete with horizontal companies would be ERP. So we compete with Oracle, Workday, SAP, Infor. Pretty much all the other product areas, we compete with what would sort of be niche companies that just focus on that product area. So we're unique in terms of the breadth of products and how those products are integrated and how they work together. So in public safety, we compete with companies like Motorola and Hexagon and Central Square. But those are different competitors than we compete with in the court space, where we compete with Journal Technologies and a lot of local companies you wouldn't have heard of. And those are different companies than we compete with in the property tax space. But those -- we have created additional value from -- for our customers by having those products work together. They have a common security and sign-on. So if you're a Tyler user at the county and you have multiple Tyler products, you only have one sign-on. If you're a citizen signing in to access different back-end systems, you have one ID. We have common payment engines, workflow engines. So it makes those -- gives each of our products a competitive advantage and a reason to have more products from Tyler. And then the integration of those products -- so for example, courts and public safety are separate or adjacent markets, but a completely different set of competitors. So we're the only company that has that whole process from a 911 call all the way through someone going on probation. So really, whether we're competing with large competitors or small local guys, the advantages we have are best-of-breed products, but integrated in that whole suite of products that works well together and the focus just being on government. So even compared to, say, Oracle or SAP or Workday, our products go much deeper in government functionality because we don't have a lot of stuff any stuff that a manufacturing company needs or a retail company because we only serve government.

All right. Fantastic. Brian, thank you very much.

Great. Thank you.