Constellation Software Inc.

Constellation Software Inc.

1,759.00
EUR
-1.00
(-0.06%)
42.58EPS
41.72P/E
35.09BMarket Cap
Nov 06Next Earn

Q2 FY2026 · Earnings Call TranscriptAugust 12, 2026

Operator

Good day and welcome to the Constellation Software conference call and webcast. All participants will be in listen-only mode.

Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by 0. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions.

To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2.

Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mark Miller, President of Constellation Software.

Please go ahead.

Mark Miller

Thank you. Good morning and thank you all for joining our Q2 call.

Before we get to questions, two things I wanted to put on the table upfront. The first is AI.

It is changing two things for us. Our customers are asking our software to do more for them, while our businesses are finding new ways to build better products faster.

We are seeing both. What we are not doing is running an AI program out of head office.

Our business unit managers understand their verticals far better than we do, and they are making those calls themselves at their own pace, funded out of their own P&Ls. Some of that work will pay for itself and some of it will not, and we will find out the same way we find out about everything else we fund, which is slowly.

As many of our businesses have been adopting AI, we are seeing them use the tools to rapidly move through our customer-driven product roadmaps and augment our products with AI functionality. Let me be direct about what that means to you.

We are not going to give you an AI target, an AI revenue line, or an AI timeline. If we start reporting a number like that, we will start managing to it.

Our software is primarily mission-critical. It is embedded in how a customer runs their businesses every day.

AI is something we add to make that software more valuable. The second thing we've been working on is verticalization.

We have been grouping our businesses and our prospects into coherent verticals where possible. The purpose is simple: we want to be the obvious permanent owner of a niche, so that when a founder starts thinking about the next 20 years and selling their business, we are the first call.

That kind of reputation takes years to build. It will not show up in this quarter's results or next year's, but I would ask you not to look for it there.

The constraint is not structure. It is having the right leader for each vertical, and leaders of that caliber take a long time to develop.

We are setting the pace accordingly. The two are connected.

Depth in a vertical is what lets you tell the difference between an AI product that matters to a customer and one that merely demonstrates well. We would rather have that judgment sitting close to the customer and understanding their needs.

Thank you very much, and I'll turn it over for questions.

Operator

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your touch-tone phone.

If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw the question, please press star then 2.

At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Thanos Moschopoulos with BMO Capital Markets.

Please go ahead.

Thanos Moschopoulos

Hi, good morning. I won't ask for an AI metric, but just qualitatively as you look across the portfolio, are you seeing a growing number of examples of businesses that are starting to see an uptick in organic growth driven by AI product enhancements, the way we heard some of the case studies at the AGMs?

Is it more and more of that happening in the portfolio that you can see, too?

Mark Miller

What we're seeing, Thanos, is we're seeing our development processes getting much better. They're moving faster through backlogs.

We're seeing a productivity increase, I think, across the group, not everywhere, but it's starting to adopt because we've spent a lot of time working on training up all of our resources on how to use AI tools better for development. Right now they're working to talk to customers about potential add-ons or additions to their products that are using some of this functionality to develop the software, but we still haven't seen a real pickup in organic growth from it.

I think that's a ways out. What I always say, you can build products fast, but selling them is a whole other thing.

A customer has to budget for them and see, and you have to be solving a need that they're willing to put some money on the table for before it's going to impact our organic growth. I think that's consistent with what we've seen in previous quarters.

I'm just really happy to see our teams adopting the tools to develop software faster, more efficiently than ever before.

Thanos Moschopoulos

Great. Then we've seen a PE acquisition you've done recently with DerbySoft, TouchBistro, and Imagine.

Is that indicative of a broader trend with respect to valuations coming down on larger assets, or kind of more of a case-by-case thing? Hi,

Bernie Anzarouth

I think it's the latter. It's Bernie here.

It's more on a case-by-case thing, and we're finding acquisition opportunities across the spectrum from owner-managers to PE to carve-outs. Those are still coming through.

It just so happens that we had significant volume this past quarter and the beginning of the third quarter. We're still seeing all of these opportunities proliferate, but it takes a lot of time and we've developed these relationships over the long term.

It just so happens that some of them happened and just took place this quarter. We're very fortunate that we were the first ones that they called and we managed to close a whole slew of them.

Thanos Moschopoulos

Great. I'll pass the line.

Thank you.

Mark Miller

Thank you, Thanos.

Operator

Our next question comes from Stephanie Price with CIBC. Please go ahead.

Mark Miller

Hi,

Stephanie Price

good morning. I just wanted to circle back on your comment around grouping businesses into verticals.

It's a little bit different than CSU's historical focus on kind of not integrating these acquisitions. Just curious if you could talk a little bit about what's changed in the market that's led you to evolve into a potentially more vertical market focus, and whether the verticals will be between different operating groups or how you think about those verticals?

Mark Miller

It's a good question, Stephanie. It's really we're not integrating businesses.

There's no business integration going on in it. We're just trying to make sure where there's a chance to let's say I like to use a Constellation expression put them in the same orbit together.

Whether or not if they're across operating groups, we'll move a few businesses in order to try to make sure that there's someone who oversees a particular vertical. It allows us to use some of these tools that we're seeing with AI that we might be able to use across some of those verticals.

That's the hypothesis. Time will tell.

We've had good success when we've had vertical-focused leaders inside of Constellation that have created, for example, Altera and things like that. I've just tried to refine that a little bit and get the businesses that should be closer together closer together, but we don't have any plans to integrate them in any way functionally or in any other way.

If they're a little closer together, they might be able to learn a little bit more from each other and it positions them better for the next 5 to 10 years.

Stephanie Price

That's good color. Thank you.

Then maybe on Altera. Altera's organic maintenance and recurring growth decelerated in the quarter.

Just curious if a large client decided not to renew. How should we think about the Altera organic maintenance growth and Altera going forward?

Jamal Baksh

I try to put it in the MD&A there, Steph, but in Q2 '25, they had a very strong quarter. They actually had a couple new-name sales.

The way IFRS makes us account for things now, if you have a large contract, you have to recognize a certain amount upfront. They actually showed, I think it was positive 1% organic growth in Q2 of '25.

Yet the trend line for this business is going to be a slow shrinker for next year or so, or a couple years I'd say. That is the driver of it.

If you normalize for that strong Q2 '25, there's nothing terrible going on. I'd expect that organic growth to revert back on a full-year basis to sort of what it has been trending at recently.

Stephanie Price

That's great color. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from David Kwan with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

David Kwan

Thanks. Just echoing on that last comment on the organic growth, Jamal.

Even if you exclude Altera from the maintenance and other recurring revenue growth in constant currency, it came in at 4%, which is below the historical range of 5% to 6%. Was there other stuff out that you'd call out, I guess, as it relates to the organic growth?

Jamal Baksh

There's a couple of other items. It's tough because you don't talk to specific BUs in the MD&A, but we had a couple of larger acquisitions like Dark Matter, where in Q2 '25, they actually recorded organic growth of it was 10%, right?

Again, this is a business that we're still fixing, has negative organic growth right now. You had this huge Q2 '25, and so therefore, you've got a -18% in Q2 '26 because of that comp.

The other thing, if you look at some recent acquisitions, Lumine is broken out. You can see that they've made some large acquisitions recently that they're pulling out.

Their organic growth in the quarter was 1%, right? Again, a drag on CSI, but things that they're expecting to turn around.

Then there was another large business that we had in South America where they lost a large customer. This business an example of a business that we knew at the time we acquired it that customer is leaving, has nothing to do with AI.

The customer has now left, but it was sizable. That customer alone was a 30-basis-point drag on CSI's numbers, right?

There's a few of these one-offs that are causing it. The two that I talked about, like the Altera and the Dark Matter, are purely accounting-related and should revert back next quarter.

The Lumine thing is they're fixing these businesses. I don't know the exact timeline of when they expect to turn them around.

If you back out those three, four things, you'd normalize back down to that sort of 5% number that we've always trended at.

David Kwan

No, appreciate the color. Are there any of these kind of whether it's tougher year-over-year comps or maybe some larger customer attrition that we should be looking out for in the coming quarters, or is it looking a little bit more normalized?

Jamal Baksh

My expectation based on what we own today is that it's normalized. We've also made a lot of large acquisitions, and I have not analyzed those to see what their impact will be in the next quarter or so.

Based on what we own today, I would say, yeah, I would expect these anomalies to sort of revert back. I'm not expecting another large customer leaving or anything based on what we have today.

David Kwan

That's helpful. Maybe one question for Bernie.

I think you kind of talked about some of the deal flows and more increased deal flows of, say, larger deals, $100 million, few hundred million dollars. It sounds like you're seeing more of that.

Are you also seeing better win rates for those deals? How's the competition for them?

Guys,

Bernie Anzarouth

I think the competition is still very robust. No one's giving up on vertical software, whether it's large or small.

We're seeing some weaknesses at the high end, but in pricing, but it's still very very competitive. It's not like we're increasing our win rates or anything like that.

It's same old try to get as much as we can. I don't see any improvement, but we had so many people out there looking for acquisitions across the board, across the globe, and it's a matter of developing those relationships over the long term.

David Kwan

Have you seen any changes within the kind of the competitors for the businesses, whether they're copycats, strategics, financial buyers?

Bernie Anzarouth

The copycats are still out there. I don't see any new ones that are popping up really.

It's more of the ones that have popped up in the last 5 to 10 years, and those still exist and they're still competing for businesses. I expect that to continue for still quite some time until maybe some of those portfolios decide that it's time to move on and they don't want to go public and they just want to sell because it's PE-backed and there's a limit to their fund.

I don't see any changes there. I don't hear of new ones popping up, or if there are, they're very small.

We hope to pick those up at some point in the future if at all possible. Hopefully at some point in the future, the number of copycats starts to reduce, but we can't predict that.

We don't know.

David Kwan

Thanks. One last question maybe for Mark.

When you were talking about the verticalization, are you changing in terms of the M&A and the BD teams for that, and how do you see an impact on potential movements in the portfolios for the companies within the pipelines for the personnel there?

Mark Miller

When we have vertical groups that are larger inside of Constellation, we've seen a lot of success deploying capital in those vertical groups. Definitely some of the M&A resources will be better aligned to verticals than stepping outside of them in some cases.

There definitely will be some changes related to that.

David Kwan

Great, thanks.

Operator

Our next question comes from Paul Treiber with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Paul Treiber

Oh, thanks very much and good morning. Could you speak to the profitability of the 2026 cohort of acquisitions?

Is it fairly typical and comparable to other cohorts, or do you see a change there?

Jamal Baksh

I think I called it out last quarter that it was negative margins, but it's more of the purchase accounting. There was some bonuses that we couldn't put as part of the purchase equation, it had to be an expense, etc.

That cohort in 20 in Q2 went from being I think it was -16% in Q1, and it's now +16% in Q2. It's going to trend up.

The 2025 cohort, similar thing, I think it started off around 16%, 17%, it's up to 20%. It's moving up.

It's not that these businesses will continue that way, it's just taking time to improve them to the levels. If you look at all the cohorts prior to that, they're probably in the 30s or high 20s, right?

It's just taking longer for them to go there, but no, they're not going to be inherently lower forever.

Paul Treiber

That's helpful. Second question, just specifically on DerbySoft, there's some disclosures in the MD&A.

Is it fair to annualize the disclosed revenue in the MD&A, and you get to roughly $100 million, and the purchase price is $400? The multiple seems high.

Is there anything wrong with my math, one? Then, secondly, is there any reason for the multiple being higher than typical?

Mark Miller

You want to talk about the multiple?

Bernie Anzarouth

It is a high multiple, but it's a very successful organization. It's growing nicely, good profitability.

It could always be a bit better, but that's what our expectations are of the business. It's a very solid business.

Jamal Baksh

We did use leverage as well, right? Remember that helps us pay a little bit more,

Bernie Anzarouth

but. Also have a great team at Constellation working on that one, Paul, as well.

Paul Treiber

The punchline on the multiple is that you still expect the IRR to be in line with acquisitions of a similar size?

Mark Miller

Absolutely. Hurdle rates aren't changing.

Paul Treiber

Thank you for taking the questions.

Operator

Our next question comes from Douglas Ott with Ondari Associates. Please go ahead.

Douglas Ott

Hi, good morning, all. I've got two topics I'd like to ask a few questions on each.

First is Altera, and I just want to thank you for the ongoing disclosure for that asset. It's been very helpful and I'm very appreciative of that to be able to track the progress on Altera.

We've crossed the four-year anniversary. We acquired it in May 2022, and since then, according to my math, that's generated a cumulative $400 million in free cash flow, all while revenues have declined from a little over $800 million to now about $646 million trailing 12 months.

My first question is do you think these results have tracked with your initial expectations?

Mark Miller

I'm not closely involved with the business, but the CEO of Harris has talked to it at the board meetings, and he has said yes, it is aligned with sort of what they expected from the investment thesis, and it's actually just operating ahead of what the expected IRR was in the original investment, so.

Douglas Ott

Got it. Also on Altera, I was curious if anyone could share any of the general learnings that you've had since acquiring it?

What has surprised you good or bad since acquiring Altera from Allscripts, and have you been able to apply any of those learnings to acquisitions since then?

Mark Miller

I would think generally just it's a very large acquisition, and it's something we've been learning how to do better over the last five, six years. We've done a bunch of larger acquisitions, and the one of the key learnings is driving best practices is harder through larger acquisitions.

You can't drive them as fast. The ability to maybe break the business up into let's say what you would call smaller business units is something that we're trying to do faster when we acquire an above-average-sized acquisition for us.

How quickly can you do that really defines how quickly you can improve the business. That's just ongoing.

That would probably be the biggest focus. I don't know if you want to add something to that, it's just driving best practices is harder with larger acquisitions.

Bernie Anzarouth

The complexity of larger businesses is really the challenge, and the various groupings, different product lines, you have to manage them as a portfolio. Because we do that on a portfolio basis in CSI, we have that experience already.

There are cultures that are just different from what we're used to at CSI, and some things have to change and it's just a little more difficult to change them.

Mark Miller

Back when we were doing smaller acquisitions or they're sort of $5 million in size, $4 or $5 million in size, it was really easy for one person to wrap their head around what had to be done to do that acquisition, how it should be improved, what best practices you could apply to it. When you're working with a much larger acquisition like an Altera or even a DerbySoft or any of these, you have to really be thinking about a team of people helping you think through what to do there and implement it, which you didn't have to do in the earlier days when you're doing smaller acquisitions.

One of the nice things about us is we've learned how to do that a lot better, and we have more people who are able to think that way than we would have let's say 10 or 15 years ago.

Douglas Ott

Thank you. All right, second Great perspective.

Second topic for me is continuing on the corporate carve-outs. I guess in general, the difference between a small acquisition and a big acquisition, you have to change how you approach things and drive best practices.

On carve-outs, is there any reason that they're a bit deal with? Can you talk about those reasons?

When it comes to analyzing it as a investment opportunity, what sorts of financial adjustments do you have to make? What sort of qualitative adjustments do you have to make?

Are there different risks? Are they greater, lesser than other types of risks?

I just appreciate some more thoughts there.

Mark Miller

We get better with them every time we do them. Bernie might want to expand on this, but they're interesting because all of their financials statements aren't clearly separated out in a lot of cases.

They're interwoven together. You have to separate them from internal systems that they're on.

There's a whole bunch of carve-out things that really you have to manage carefully. Plus whoever you're buying the carve-out from, they really care where their customers end up in a lot of cases, right?

You've also got to balance that as well. There's a lot of things you do differently with a carve-out that you wouldn't with a standalone acquisition.

Now, Bernie, what would you add to that?

Bernie Anzarouth

The same goes for the way we look at businesses in terms of return on investment. Every decision that we make within our business is based on return on investment.

If we can't see that return, we just won't do it unless it's really strategic, as it were. A lot of the businesses that we do get from carve-outs don't look at their businesses that way.

That's a bit of an infusion that we give them, and we try to set their minds towards measuring that investment. There are lots of decisions that these businesses make on a regular basis, and when it's a larger business with various product lines, you have to take that decision, make them more granular, and infuse that kind of thinking into the people that make those decisions.

Mark Miller

They're generally not very balance sheet driven, right? They're not thinking about the balance sheet, and the balance sheet's obviously something pretty important to understand.

Just figuring out what that is and getting them to think about managing their working capital is harder than it would be for a standalone business because they're not used to having a separate balance sheet for that particular carve-out.

Douglas Ott

Awesome, great. Just one final carve-outs.

Would you agree that in your universe of potential acquisitions targets, are carve-outs typically an area where Constellation can deploy larger amounts of capital?

Bernie Anzarouth

We've been doing it for years, and I think that the fact that we've done it with Fortune 500 companies just underlines our ability to do carve-outs appropriately and maintain that customer base as expected. I think these larger businesses are more than happy to deal with us when it comes to taking care of the customer base and the employee base.

I think we'll see, hopefully, more of those. We have done multiple carve-outs from individual businesses, too, which is kind of nice.

Mark Miller

Right. Because

Bernie Anzarouth

your reputation is important, very important, that you take care of their customers and their employees when you're taking over a business like that, and that matters to them.

Douglas Ott

Can you put any kind of general number on potential carve-outs that might be out there? Are they in the hundreds or is it greater than that?

Mark Miller

No.

Douglas Ott

Yeah.

Bernie Anzarouth

We wish we could see the future and know all of that, yeah.

Douglas Ott

All right,

Bernie Anzarouth

keep plugging.

Douglas Ott

That's it for me. I really appreciate it.

Bernie Anzarouth

Great questions. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from Kevin McVeigh with UBS. Please go ahead.

Kevin McVeigh

Great, thanks so much, and hey, good morning. Thank you so much, and nice results here.

Hey, it seems like the M&A, particularly first six months of the year, been elevated. Should we expect a similar pace in the back half of the year, or just any thoughts on the cadence, just given there's been some pretty good success in the first half of the year?

Bernie Anzarouth

I hate to predict things. We have a very robust funnel.

We're working with a lot of businesses. Whether they happen in the second half of the year, whether they happen in the future is impossible to tell.

You've seen our results last year were lower. It's just so hard to predict when these businesses will actually close with us and whether they will close,

Mark Miller

so. We just want to make sure we're on the playing field when they're available, right?

We want to be out there trying to win.

Kevin McVeigh

Super helpful. Then the pacing of the organic growth, obviously, last year, the first quarter, there was only about $94 million of acquisitions as opposed to $380 million in the second quarter.

Does that 380 start to come into the base in the third quarter? Said another way, right, is it the third quarter where it starts to get into the organic base?

Jamal Baksh

The way I calculate organic growth is I pro forma our history as if we owned that business for the full year or for the prior comparable period. If we're buying businesses that are turnarounds and we need to fix or whatever, it impacts organic growth right away.

That's why I do it that way is as opposed to waiting a year or whatever before sort of showing in our numbers, so.

Kevin McVeigh

That's to the point earlier where it was a little bit slower because some of those ones that had

Mark Miller

Exactly.

Kevin McVeigh

Got it. No, that makes a lot of sense.

Then get back in the queue. It seems like the taxes in the second quarter were a lot higher than what we modeled.

Was there anything there? Just relative to the income taxes paid in the second quarter, it was almost double what we thought.

Jamal Baksh

If you're looking at cash tax, that's just timing and, but I always look at the current tax expense as a percentage of sort of this adjusted net income before tax, and that number is sort of in line in that sort of mid-20s, which it always is. Current tax approximates cash tax.

If you look at the current tax line, it's pretty stable. The cash tax will fluctuate based on payments, man.

Kevin McVeigh

Helpful. A last one for me.

The commentary on the AI was super helpful. As you're thinking about implementation internally from an expense perspective, any way to think about where you are in that process, and then any way to dimensionalize the tokenization side of it?

In terms of increasing token costs relative to productivity, and how are you just managing that? Is the token cost where you thought it was going to be, or just any thoughts around that as well?

Jamal Baksh

We started tracking this, we've created now GL accounts that will track sort of the token expense and any costs relating to AI. Still early days.

If you look at our P&L right now, you'll see third-party maintenance slightly up, but nothing material. I'll be honest with you, I don't have a clear number of what the total expenses that relating to AI.

This is something we'll start tracking now going forward. I do not believe it's materially impacting us today.

It is something that as we talk about this internally, it's something we take into consideration, even the tools that we use, making sure we're not beholden to any one provider and, yeah.

Mark Miller

I agree with Jamal. Those things are correct.

I think in some cases, we've pushed people really hard to start using the AI tools to start increasing their productivity and ability to get customers what they need faster. I think it's really interesting to see where the tools evolve.

In some cases, we're using one of the expressions internally is we're using a blowtorch to light a cigarette. We're using very powerful tools for problems that probably don't need those today, but it's just you sort of want to, I would say, roll with it right now in order to make sure you're adopting technology fast and people understand what's possible.

It's going to be an interesting journey for us. The great news is we haven't banked on any one particular platform to use.

We'll learn from each other and adapt as necessary. Our businesses will have the opportunity very quickly change course and what tools to use if we're thinking things are getting too expensive.

So

Kevin McVeigh

Super helpful. Thank you.

Mark Miller

super worried about that.

Kevin McVeigh

Yeah.

Operator

Our next question comes from Teddy Farley with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Teddy Farley

Hi, this is Teddy on for Samad Samana. Thank you for taking our question and congrats on another solid quarter.

A handful of software companies have called out headcount this earnings season, either with plans to reduce or aim for flat headcount, including a shift away from G&A towards sales and marketing. How does that compare with the thinking across your portfolio companies for the balance of 2026?

Mark Miller

We're not thinking really a lot about headcount reductions. Remember, we're a very decentralized organization.

We don't have this big 20,000-person R&D group that works across the world. We have individual businesses all over the world that have development groups that, in some cases, have single-digit number of people and, in some cases, have double-digit numbers of people.

Very rarely have hundreds of developers in any one business. We're really trying to get them to be able to offer their customers more faster and get through product roadmaps and fix bugs and things like that using these tools.

Headcount reduction is not a focus of the company at this point.

Teddy Farley

Awesome, thank you so much for the color.

Operator

Our next question comes from Ryan Floyd with Barca Capital. Please go ahead.

Ryan Floyd

Thanks so much for doing these quarterly calls and the transparency. It's really wonderful.

It's Barca Capital.

Mark Miller

Morning.

Ryan Floyd

My question is not about AI. Based on public information, it seems like a lot of your IRR when you buy something comes from changes in working capital.

I am just curious, is this generally the case? If so, could you give a very rough sense, maybe, of what portion of the IRR comes from changes in working capital when you buy something?

The reason that it's important is if people are thinking about cash flows from your deals very long-term, if a lot of the cash flows are showing up earlier, it doesn't matter that much than if they're showing up, I don't know, in 15 years or something like that. The other question I have is not about AI, but it's just general.

It is have you seen a change in the number and profitability of your capital-I initiatives in the last say 6 months or 12 months compared to two or three years, or is it about the same? Have you seen profitability much higher, much lower?

I don't know, you're doing 5x of these or 10% more, or it's just about the same? Again, thanks for doing the call.

We all appreciate it. We appreciate the tone, the transparency, and the disclosure.

Thanks very much, guys.

Bernie Anzarouth

Just to hit the working capital question, every acquisition is different. I know back in the early days, like the very early days of Constellation, it was a big factor in our acquisitions, but it didn't mean that it detracted from the IRR of the businesses themselves or the cash flow that we could generate from those businesses.

Today, again, working capital changes make a little bit of an impact, but not a lot. The biggest impact is from running the businesses appropriately and getting the cash flows out of those businesses.

It's really operating changes that we make to the businesses as opposed to working capital. If there is an added bonus that we can find within working capital, then all the better.

I wouldn't say that it's a significant portion of our returns. Hope that helps.

Ryan Floyd

That does help. Is it fair to say or have you had an eyeball on trying to get those cash flows?

I know you're very time-value-of-money oriented, but getting those cash flows earlier rather than later, or saying beyond four or five years, we don't think too much about it?

Bernie Anzarouth

Sure, we always try, but sometimes these things do take time. In Europe, I think it takes maybe a bit more time than it does in North America to make changes to our businesses.

We try to get them done as quickly as possible. That is our objective to make sure these businesses are operating appropriately like our 1,500 other plus other businesses so that they're in line with our operating guidelines.

We do try to get them done as early as possible, yes.

Mark Miller

Sometimes you have to look at customer contracts and it takes time, right?

Ryan Floyd

In

Mark Miller

a long time, especially with large customer contracts. Those relationships are very important as well.

You have to think through how to make those. We model that all off as we think to an investment carefully, so.

Bernie Anzarouth

Operating cash flows is first and foremost, way more than working capital. If we find those opportunities with working capital, we definitely do take advantage of those, yes.

Mark Miller

Measure it very closely, yeah.

Bernie Anzarouth

You were asking about initiatives, I think,

Ryan Floyd

was as well.

Mark Miller

There's a lot of initiatives going on throughout the organization. There's sort of two types of approaches to initiatives.

We really love customer-driven initiatives where the customers actually say they need something and we help them figure out what that is. Some businesses are incredibly driven by just what the customers want now, especially our larger customers, we do things for.

Then others are creating there's a number of AI initiatives going on, for example, right now where they're creating potential products by listening to what we call revenue signals from customers. I think there's probably more initiatives now than there was a year ago, and we'll just have to see what those amount to in the end, what the actual returns on the capital that we're investing in doing those.

We have a very open mind to people experimenting right now with technology of all thing and AI.

Ryan Floyd

Do you have anything you could give us a sense of how well those early ones have been doing?

Mark Miller

It's too early. It really is.

It's really too early. Now, what's interesting to me, what we've seen, I think, this quarter, if we see some other outside company coming potentially to a sort of more of a horizontal play in some of our verticals, we're able to be much faster followers, which I hadn't thought a lot about.

We've always had the ability to be a fast follower, but you can be a faster follower with AI, especially when you have a lot of customers in that particular area. As long as you've skilled up your team so that they're able to move fast, they can move much, much faster and provide customers something.

That's kind of a neat outcome, right? Because if it took years to build, some initiatives, it takes seven, eight, nine years to get them to maximum revenues over time, believe it or not.

In the early days. Maybe some opportunity to do some things faster in certain areas now, where other people have driven up the desire for that type of a product line.

That must be fun to watch that for me over the next few years.

Ryan Floyd

That's great. I might sneak in one small question.

You operate in many different countries and many regulated industries, in particular.

Mark Miller

Yeah.

Ryan Floyd

I think you said that regulated industries are often less likely to prefer cloud solutions or maybe AI solutions. Have you found that country to country, regulated industries have different preferences with respect to on-premise or AI-coded products?

Mark Miller

It's more sector to sector within countries, I'd say. I wouldn't have a broad conclusion on that.

I'd say it depends on the sector. If you're government, you're clearly very concerned about those things.

Banking, healthcare. It's sector-specific in every country, I would think, Ryan, so.

Ryan Floyd

Thanks very much. Thanks again for your time.

I'll step out.

Mark Miller

Thank you.

Bernie Anzarouth

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question is a follow-up from Douglas Ott with Ondari Associates. Please go ahead.

Douglas Ott

Hi again. I've got two more questions.

I'm curious if you guys, the management team and board, are still studying high-performing conglomerates and other successful businesses? Along with that question, I'm just curious, how do those learnings trickle down, or how far do they trickle down?

Is it just the top people that are studying these other businesses, or are there hundreds of business unit managers that are also trying to glean lessons from these case studies?

Mark Miller

It's a really good question. I've been fortunate enough to be able to be involved in understanding that, as well as the senior team at Constellation.

I think it really varies by the operating group how far they drive those down within side of Constellation. There's a lot of content that we shared for people as we're onboarding new companies, on how we see the world.

Larry Cunningham did a study for the group that I oversaw for many years, Volaris, and he went and interviewed 70 of our leaders across the world, and really wanted to understand how invasive, I guess you want to call it our beliefs are, and how people think similarly. It was pretty interesting because we've created I think a common lingo and a common understanding across the world on how to approach things, independent of language, business.

I do think, even if it isn't explicitly going through a particular conglomerate and how they've approached things, just the general lessons of what we've learned at Constellation over the last three decades tend to be everywhere, which is surprising. In a decentralized organization, it's always fascinating to see that, right?

I was pretty happy to realize that Larry came to those conclusions.

Douglas Ott

Interesting. Secondly, it's been a pretty long time since Mark Leonard initially floated the idea of perhaps one day Constellation having to look outside of the world of vertical market software to deploy capital.

Given the level of capital you've deployed, continuing in software, has that effort taken more of a back seat, or is it still ongoing, or how is the level of desire evolved with that potential initiative?

Mark Miller

Obviously, with our ability to get more capital out, we're interested in focusing on software and making sure we're doing software as best we possibly can. It's something we discuss occasionally, but it's not really a focus right now.

There's so much more for us to do in this software world. I wish I could say we're all done, we're finished, but there's too much stuff to do.

We're constantly learning, and I think our teams are able to do larger acquisitions now, which has opened up a whole new realm for us. We couldn't have done that 15, 20 years ago.

It just keeps us

Douglas Ott

all busy. Good.

That's an interesting point because I think a good part or one way people are attracted and passionate to continue working at Constellation is just it seems like a robust amount of opportunities for career development and learning into different roles. Is that something that people are really happy about and talk to you guys?

Mark Miller

For sure. I did something at Volaris, I remember, three, four years ago at a big event where we had 200 people in London, and I interviewed five people on stage, and three of the five were interns who were overseeing portfolios.

That was 15 years later, after working for it for 15 years. There's lots of career opportunities at Constellation and it needs to be.

In a decentralized environment, you create a lot more career opportunities. When you're in a large functional organization, you hit sort of walls, if you want to call it.

Aren't as possible here. Many more people in our world can run a business inside of Constellation.

They can take on other roles. I think it's kind of an interesting place to work, and we're super keen on continuing to develop our people across the world.

It's the single most important thing we do.

Douglas Ott

Great. Thank you so much.

Operator

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mark Miller for any closing remarks.

Mark Miller

No, just thank everybody for dialing in and asking a bunch of good questions. We're looking forward to getting through this quarter and chatting with you again in three months.

Over and out from Toronto, and have a great rest of day and rest of summer.

Bernie Anzarouth

Thank you.

Mark Miller

Bye.

Operator

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation.

You may now disconnect.