Altair Engineering Inc. (NASDAQ:ALTR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark Schappel: Great. And then one more question. I appreciate your commentary regarding the cross-selling of data analytics into the design customers. I was wondering if you’d just provide some additional color around that, whether you’re seeing any particular uptake in, say, certain industries or geographies more so than others.

Jim Scapa: It’s super broad-based, actually. I was just looking at a whole bunch of the wins that we have, and it’s interesting for me, you know, we’re seeing the data analytics technology playing in some of our HPC customers that we weren’t selling simulation to before, and I think that’s going to continue to grow pretty substantially. We’re seeing HPC actually rising in some of the accounts where we didn’t see it earlier. And obviously, a lot of the electronic stuff that we’re bringing to the fore, I think is starting to have an impact. But everyone is very, very interested in applying data science. And I think we’re, at this point, we are the leading company in moving in that direction. Others are chasing now, but there’s been many years of work here done.

Operator: And our next question coming from the line of Matthew Hedberg with RBC Capital Markets.

Matthew Hedberg: Jim, you just mentioned your HPC business, and I actually wanted to follow up on that. Do you think there is a longer-term opportunity, and you guys have been investing there for years, for you to leverage even more generative AI capabilities in the future?

Jim Scapa: I mean, the answer is yes. I think I’ve made this comment before that I started investing on the data science side because I started seeing supercomputing, you know, the supercomputing conference was starting to move from just being, you know, all about simulation to more and more data science. I absolutely see growing, the amount of HPC that’s being done is growing by leaps and bounds. Of course, a lot of it is moving to cloud or hybrid infrastructures and all that. A lot of it is moving to the edge as well. And we’re building technology that lets you basically run where and when you want to, manage costs very effectively, manage the cost of software licenses very effectively. And that’s what companies need. They’re all very challenged by all this complexity. And I think we’re in a really great spot.

Matthew Hedberg: That’s fantastic. And then for either you or Matt. Jim, you said, I think you gave some commentary on next year, expect to continue to grow, I guess, for either of you. How do you think about spending or investing in front of a calendar ’24 cycle? Do you expect to sort of increase investments in certain areas? Just trying to get a sense maybe of the margin trajectory as well.

Jim Scapa: Yes, I mean, we held pretty tight this year, and I think we’re going to do similarly coming into next year, although we are going to open up in couple of areas that we see as really critical for us to continue to invest in. But on balance, we’re still continuing to try and grow the margins and continue to invest where needed. So we’re getting more and more capable, I think, at moving our resources where we need them to be. But you do have to continue to invest as well. I don’t know if Matt wants to add something there. He probably does.

Matt Brown: Yes, I mean, the only thing I’d add is just, I agree with everything Jim just said, but in addition, one of the things that we’re super proud of is the year-on-year increase now in our OpEx. I mentioned it in my prepared remarks, but what we’re seeing is the smallest year-on-year quarterly percentage increase that we’ve seen in a number of years now. So, we’ve been very disciplined this year as we were starting to digest some of the acquisitions that we made late last year. And so, that’s starting to play out in a way that we had anticipated in Q3 and Q4. So, we’re happy about that and we’re going to continue to be disciplined, but then of course spend and invest where necessary. So, we’ve got lots of different places in mind there, but continue to be disciplined in our approach and have a really good outlook for 2024 as well.