Xylem Inc. (NYSE:XYL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Patrick Decker: Sure. So Deane, I’ll just make a few comments, and I’ll have Matthew go a little deeper because Matthew was part of the team that was integral to this courtship over the course of the past year or more. So he’s well versed along with other team members on the opportunity here. But you’re right, you said it best. It’s the amalgamation of data coming from different data sources that we refer to as the power babble, with different languages, different code, and it makes it very difficult for the utility to optimize their overall network. So that’s really what Idrica is getting at. They got a great platform already around the world, and our channels to utilities is really the big opportunity for them. But overlaying this solution to where effectively the way I described it, it’s almost as they built the interoperable operating software on which our operating technologies will sit along with other apps that make it easier for the utility user to interface.

But Matthew, do you want to talk a little bit about pricing and just the opportunity in the upside?

Matthew Pine: Yes. So from a pricing point of view, Deane, really there’s an implementation cost, obviously, to go implement the platform, which is a fee. And then it’s really, to your point, a Software-as-a-Service. It’s a subscription fee that’s ongoing in some term is really the model that we’ve built. And just really amplifying your point, again, one of the biggest pain points we hear and we believe really this partnership will translate into really the digital adoption rates in the water sector. We see this as really being an aggregator in terms of bringing all these disparate systems together that Patrick mentioned. And our teams are engaged in building commercial momentum. We’ve implemented a few pilots that are starting to see great results from our collaboration already. But as we ramp through the year and build backlog, that will start to really unpack in Q4 and into ’24.

Patrick Decker: And I would clarify, Deane, that when we say pilots in this case, these are actual commercial arrangements that are revenue generating. It’s not a pilot where we’re going and testing something. So we’ve already had some very impressive potential wins there that we’ll talk about in the, hopefully, the next quarter.

Operator: And we’ll take our next question from Joe Giordano with Cowen.

Joe Giordano: So I just want to follow up on that Idrica stuff real quick and then move on. But is that something that utilities would put in, like, on top of what they already have? Or would it like more likely go like something that they would decide to move forward with like if they’re putting in a new deployment?

Patrick Decker: A lot of utilities don’t have anything like this. So it’s really on top of what they have, Joe, and it’s integrating all their disparate systems, their SCADA systems, their PLC systems, their ERPs. Anything that’s bringing data into their ecosystem gets consolidated into the platform with 1 dashboard and 1 interface. And if you think about a lot of the challenges of our utility customers and lots of different industrial customers in general, is they’ve got multiple applications, multiple passwords, all the information is siloed and they don’t have a way to aggregate it. So this would come on as a layer to do that aggregation and give them a way to, as people say, democratize the data, be able to get the data to a user to make sense of all the information coming in.