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Tyler Technologies Inc (TYL 1.71%)
Q3Â 2018 Earnings Conference Call
Nov. 01, 2018, 10:00 a.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Hello and welcome to today's Tyler Technologies Third Quarter 2018 Conference Call. Your host for today's call is John Marr, Chairman of Tyler Technologies. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. And as a reminder, this conference is being recorded, as of today, November 1st, 2018.
I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Marr. Mr. Marr, please go ahead.
John Marr -- Executive Chairman of the Board
Thank you and welcome to our third quarter 2018 earnings call. With me on the call today are Lynn Moore, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Brian Miller, our Chief Financial Officer.
First, I'd like for Brian to give the Safe Harbor statement, next Lynn will have some preliminary comments, then Brian will review the details of our third quarter results and update our 2018 guidance, then I'll have some final comments, and we'll take your questions. Brian?
Brian Miller -- Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer
Thanks, John. During the course of this conference call management may make statements that provide information other than historical information and may include projections concerning the Company's future prospects, revenues, expenses and profits. Such statements are considered forward-looking statements under the Safe Harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from these projections. We would refer you to our Form 10-K and other SEC filings for more information on those risks.
Effective January 1st, 2018 we adopted the requirements of ASU No. 2014-09 Topic 606, Revenue from Contracts with Customers, utilizing the full retrospective method of transition. Prior year amounts have been restated from previously reported amounts to reflect the impact of the full retrospective adoption of Topic 606. Please note that all growth comparisons we make on the call today will relate to the corresponding period of last year unless we specify otherwise.
Lynn?
H. Lynn Moore -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director
Thanks, Brian. Our third quarter earnings were in line with our expectations and cash flow exceeded expectations, even though revenues were somewhat below plan. Total GAAP revenues grew 10% and non-GAAP revenues grew 10.5% with 6.5% organic growth. We continue to experience exceptional growth in our cloud-based business as GAAP subscription revenues grew 32% and non-GAAP subscription revenues grew 35%. Total recurring revenues from maintenance and subscriptions grew 14% and comprised 66% of total revenue.
From a product perspective growth for our enterprise products, which include ERP, appraisal and tax, and civic services, exceeded expectations. We continue to experience strong win rates and industry-leading competitive positions for these products with significant scale and generally deep sales pipelines.
Growth for our justice products, which include courts and public safety, lagged expectations. We have a number of new courts and justice initiatives that we are confident will provide long-term growth, including new offerings like Modria, re:Search, and redaction, as well as international expansion. However, revenues from those offerings are initially less predictable and have come online more slowly than planned. We continue to have success in winning new public safety clients and the total value of new name public safety contracts signed year-to-date is up 34% over 2017.
However, we are also pursuing some larger and more complex opportunities with our New World solutions. The sales process for a number of those deals has been prolonged, affecting the timing of not only license revenues, but also the associated professional services and maintenance revenues.
It's also important to note that approximately half of the new public safety contract value for the year is expected to be signed in the fourth quarter, which if executed, will contribute to an expected acceleration of our growth rate in the fourth quarter. Our long-term view of the opportunity in the public safety space is more positive than ever. And our investments in the New World product suite are clearly resonating with clients and prospects and positively affecting win rates.
Our largest new license deal of the quarter was with Lubbock County, Texas, right at $10 million for a comprehensive suite of solutions including Munis enterprise resource planning, New World public safety records management and computer-aided dispatch, Brazos eCitation, SoftCode Civil process, Odyssey Courts case management, including Tyler corrections and Odyssey Jury prosecutor and pretrial. These Tyler line of solutions will manage Lubbock County's entire justice process from dispatch to disposition. With the addition of these products to the Tyler solutions they already use Lubbock County will become one of the most comprehensive users of Tyler software in the nation.
Also in the quarter, we signed a $7 million deal with Loudoun County, Virginia for EnerGov civic services solution. The county will replace its 20-year old legacy land management information system with our EnerGov community development suite to streamline and automate its enterprise land management permitting and development review process. Loudoun County also uses iasWorld property tax solution.
Other significant on-premises license deals signed during the quarter, each with a total contract value of $1 million or more included Knox County, Tennessee, for our Munis ERP and iasWorld appraisal solutions; Des Moine, Iowa, for our EnerGov solution; contracts with Hays County, Texas; and the Bi-County Police Information Network in Washington State for our New World public safety solution; Norwood, Massachusetts, for our Munis ERP solution; and Casper, Wyoming, for our Munis ERP, EnerGov and an ExecuTime solutions.
The New World public safety contracts signed this quarter in Lubbock, Hays, Cameron and Gillespie counties in Texas represent major new inroads into the Texas market, where New World has previously not had a significant presence.
Significant new SaaS contracts in the quarter included Columbus, Georgia, consolidated government for our Odyssey court case management solution, contracts for our Munis ERP solutions with the cities of Roswell, New Mexico; and New London, Connecticut; and the East Side Union High School District in San Jose, California; and Blue Earth County, Minnesota for our iasWorld appraisal solution. We also signed a three-year contract with the Texas Office of Courts Administration valued at $5 million to provide redaction and value-added attorney services as an addition to the existing e-filing arrangement.
During the quarter, we also announced the availability of the New World ShieldForce Mobile Application. ShiedlForce makes real-time and mission-critical data for public safety agencies available instantly, ultimately improving their situational awareness and overall safety. The application provides a vital connection between patrol officers, dispatchers and command staff by extending computer-aided dispatch functionality on to a smartphone, tablet or watch. ShieldForce is just one example of innovation we're bringing to market through our increased investments in R&D.
Now, I'd like for Brian to provide more detail on the results of the quarter and update our annual guidance for 2018.
Brian Miller -- Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer
Thanks, Lynn. Yesterday Tyler Technologies reported its results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2018. I'm going to provide some additional data on the quarter's performance and update our annual guidance for 2018 and then John will have some additional comments.
In our earnings release we have included non-GAAP measures that we believe facilitate understanding of our results and comparisons with peers in the software industry. These measures exclude writedowns of acquisition-related deferred revenue and acquired leases, share-based compensation expense, the employer portion of payroll taxes on employee stock transactions and amortization of acquired intangibles. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is provided in our earnings release. We've also posted on the Investor Relations section of our website under the Financial Reports tab schedules with supplemental information provided on this call, including information about quarterly bookings, backlog and recurring revenues.
GAAP revenues for the quarter were $236.1 million, up 9.9%. GAAP organic revenue growth was 6.6%. On a non-GAAP basis, revenues were $237.6 million, up 10.5% with a 6.5% organic growth. Subscription revenues for the quarter increased 32.3%. We added 81 new subscription-based arrangements and converted 31 existing on-premises clients, representing approximately $29.2 million in total contract value. In Q3 of last year we added 94 new subscription-based arrangements and had 15 on-premise conversions, representing approximately $42.5 million in total contract value.
Subscription clients represented approximately 47% of the number of new software contracts in the quarter compared to 49% in the prior year quarter. While subscription contract value comprised 37% of the total new software contract value signed this quarter compared to 51% in Q3 of last year. The value-weighted average term of new SaaS contracts this quarter was 3.6 years compared to 5.4 years in Q3 of last year.
Transaction-based revenues from e-filing and online payments, which are included in subscriptions, increased 16.4% to $17.9 million from $15.4 million last year. That amount includes e-filing revenue of $13.3 million, up 12.2% over last year.
Annualized total non-GAAP recurring revenues for Q3 were approximately $625 million, up 14.6%. Our backlog at the end of the quarter was $1.2 billion, up 7.3%. Backlog included $355 million of maintenance compared to $340 million a year ago. Subscription backlog was $488 million compared to $443 million last year and includes approximately $128 million related to fixed fee e-filing contracts.
Our bookings for this quarter, which are calculated from the change in backlog plus non-GAAP revenues, were approximately $255 million, a decrease of 5.2% from Q3 of last year. For the trailing 12 months bookings were approximately $1 billion, up 17.9%.
As we noted earlier, the weighted average term of new software subscription agreements this quarter was 3.6 years compared to 5.4 years last year, as we have moved to standardized on shorter initial subscription terms for most of our software offerings to provide greater pricing flexibility. The combination of a lower mix of subscription contracts and a shorter term for new subscriptions negatively affected our bookings growth. If the initial term for this quarter's subscription bookings had been the same as last year, our bookings growth would have been 260 basis points higher. In addition, last year's Q3 bookings included a $12 million contract for research in Illinois.
Our software subscription bookings in the quarter added $5.6 million in new annual recurring revenue, down 10.4% from $6.3 million last year. For comparison, if all of our subscription contracts had been under license arrangements, we estimate that they would have represented additional license bookings of approximately $6.5 million. We signed 29 new contracts in the quarter that included software licenses greater than $100,000 and those contracts had an average license of $465,000 compared to 32 new contracts with an average license value of $381,000 in the third quarter of 2017.
Cash flow from operations grew 20.8% to $112.1 million and surpassed the $100 million in a quarter for the first time. Free cash flow, which is calculated as cash from operations less capital expenditures was $103.6 million, up nearly 22%. Our CapEx for the quarter was $8.5 million including approximately $215,000 related to real estate compared to total CapEx of $7.6 million in Q3 of last year, which included $3.6 million related to real estate.
We ended the quarter with $315.3 million in cash and investments and no outstanding debt. Days sales outstanding and accounts receivable were 107 days at September 30, 2018, compared to 94 days at September 30th, 2017. Excluding unbilled receivables, DSOs were 79 days at September 30, 2018, compared to 74 days at September 30, 2017.
Our guidance for the full year of 2018 is as follows. We expect 2018 GAAP revenues will be between $934 million and $944 million, and non-GAAP revenues will be between $940 million and $950 million. We expect 2018 GAAP diluted EPS will be between $3.63 and $3.71, and may vary significantly due to the impact of stock option exercises on the GAAP effective tax rate. We expect 2018 non-GAAP diluted EPS will be between $4.76 and $4.84. For the year estimated pre-tax non-cash share-based compensation expense is expected to be approximately $55 million. We expect R&D expense for the year will be between $62 million and $64 million. Fully diluted shares for the year are expected to be between 40.2 and 40.5 million shares.
GAAP earnings per share assumes an estimated annual effective tax rate of 4% after discrete tax items and includes approximately $36 million of discrete tax benefits primarily related to share-based compensation, which may vary significantly based on the timing and volume of stock option exercises. Our estimated non-GAAP annual effective tax rate for 2018 is 24%. This rate was reduced from 35% for 2017 to reflect the enactment of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act. We expect our total capital expenditures will be between $23 million and $26 million for the year. Total depreciation and amortization is expected to be approximately $62 million, including approximately $40 million of amortization of acquired intangibles.
Now, I'd like to turn the call over to John for his comments.
John Marr -- Executive Chairman of the Board
Thanks, Brian. Tyler continued to execute at a high level in the third quarter. We achieved double-digit revenue growth for the 28th consecutive quarter. We're pleased that we were able to grow non-GAAP operating income for the quarter, while increasing our R&D spend 44% and absorbing acquisitions that are mostly dilutive this year.
Our non-GAAP earnings guidance for the year is unchanged from the second quarter when we adjusted it upward from our initial outlook. Although we have revised our revenue guidance to slightly lower the upper end of the range, we expect organic and total revenue growth to accelerate in the fourth quarter. At the midpoint of our non-GAAP revenue guidance, total revenue growth for the fourth quarter would be approximately 14% and organic revenue growth would be approximately 9%.
As Lynn noted earlier, our enterprise products are performing exceptionally well. Revenues for the second half of the year from these products are exceeding expectations with solid double-digit growth from what are some of our more mature products.
For our justice products, second-half growth is below our plan in part because we've reduced our outlook for revenues from new initiatives to drive long-term growth. Although these revenues have proven to be less predictable and slower to develop, the market has been very receptive to these offerings and recent activity is encouraging. For research, we have contracts with Texas, Illinois and New Mexico. And we signed contracts this quarter with 14 counties in Georgia. The lack of precedents is driving longer-than-expected time-frames to turn on value-added services for attorneys.
For redaction we signed a three-year contract with Texas this quarter. And with pilot project starting in both Texas and New Mexico, we expect to expand across our client base from there. With Modria, we have signed several contracts including major clients like Clark County, Nevada; and Los Angeles County, California, and have several pilot projects under way. While the lack of precedents for online dispute resolution is resulting in smaller pilot projects than originally expected, initial results have surpassed client expectations and we expect that these early successes will lead to expanded use and a greater contribution to growth in 2019 as our sales pipeline is strong.
We continue to make significant progress with integrating Socrata, now known as our data and insights division. The new Socrata-connected Government Cloud has resonated with the market since its release earlier this year. And we've signed seven new contracts for SEGC in the quarter, adding new clients at the federal, state and local levels. We are also successfully cross-selling Socrata through our other Tyler divisions and are building a strong pipeline through other Tyler channels.
While investing in product development at a high level, we've also completed two additional acquisitions that add native cloud solutions with important functionality: one in the third quarter and one in early October, for the total combined purchase price of approximately $14 million in cash. CaseloadPRO, acquired August 31st, strengthens the probation and supervision offerings in our justice suite. MobileEyes, acquired October 1st as valuable solutions for fire protection and inspections. We continued to pursue additional strategic acquisition opportunities to broaden our capabilities, expand our addressable markets and enhance growth.
As we noted earlier, Q3 was a record quarter for cash flow. The strength of our balance sheet and consistency of our cash flow give us a great deal of flexibility to deploy capital and create value. While we did not repurchase our stock in the third quarter, we have since resumed buyback activity and have repurchased approximately 155,000 shares of our common stock in October. We currently have remaining authorization to repurchase 1.8 million shares.
Finally, in October, we launched our newly redesigned website, which is easier to navigate and provides a vastly improved visitor experience compared to our previous site. We invite you to visit our website at tylertech.com and explore the new content.
Now, we'll take your questions.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
We'll now begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) The first question today comes from Alexis Huseby with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.
Peter Heckmann -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
Hey, good morning. This is actually Pete Heckmann. Had a question, Brian. So just to be clear on a constant term basis, of about 5.4 years, bookings would have been down about 2.5% year-over-year. Is that how I interpret your comment?
Brian Miller -- Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer
That's correct.
Peter Heckmann -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
Okay. And then just on the LTM bookings growth, are you comparing bookings under 606 to bookings under 605? I'm seeing a lower growth number on the LTM the 18%.
Brian Miller -- Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer
No, it should be both 606 numbers, everything should be restated for 606. We have a schedule of bookings that's posted on the website, but those should all be restated 606 bookings. It does include adding Socrata into the backlog as well, so that's included in that number, the new number.
Peter Heckmann -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
Okay. That's helpful. As regards Socrata, would you -- would the Socrata generate sequentially higher revenue in the third quarter?
Brian Miller -- Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer
Sequentially higher than from Q2 to Q3?
Peter Heckmann -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
Yeah.
Brian Miller -- Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer
I believe that's the case. Socrata's revenues did increase significantly from Q2 to Q3 although for us it really, it was only in a month in Q2. So it's a little hard to compare the two months before Tyler the month after, but generally Socrata's revenues are increasing and also looking at a fairly significant increase in Q4 over Q3.
Peter Heckmann -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
Got it. Okay. Thank you.
Operator
The next question comes from Scott Berg with Needham & Company.
Scott Berg -- Needham & Company -- Analyst
Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. Lynn, I wanted to start off with the comments on the public safety business. That business, I know, is more weighted toward the back half of the year than your other products. So I guess it's not a surprise that Q4 is heavier there. But, as you look at the bookings opportunity there, what's your expectations on Q4? How does that compare for the entire year versus your beginning of the year expectations?
H. Lynn Moore -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director
Well, I think our expectations are still strong in public safety. As I think we mentioned in the comments, the second half and Q4, in particular, has a large number of new clients. I think about half of their new licenses are really scheduled to be signed in Q4. I think, overall, in 2018, licenses in public safety are looking to be up around 25%, 30%, new name growth may be 10% to 12%, and really the deal size is growing as well. I think the average size deal year-over-year is up in the 55%, 60%. So overall, I think what's going on in public safety is good. They just had their largest user conference, the IACP, our new products are showing well, the integrations that we're showing with Socrata, there's a lot of excitement around what we can do with Socrata public safety analytic. So, generally speaking, the trends there are still looking good.
Scott Berg -- Needham & Company -- Analyst
Yeah. We attended that conference and came away pretty positive on it. That's why seeking commentary there. It sounds like you're feeling pretty comfortable, at least, with that business over the near-term.
And then the last question I have is around Socrata. You've had the asset for five months. Sounds like you're starting to sell it well, but five months later, any differences in opinion on the opportunity there, whether positive or on the negative side or is it kind of right line with initial expectations?
H. Lynn Moore -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director
I'd say, right now, it's right in line with expectations. There is a lot of excitement I think internally in Tyler and as well in the market. I think I mentioned in the call last quarter, one thing that we've been doing is we've been looking at opportunities within Tyler and we've been working on product roadmaps for each division and how Socrata is really going to integrate with each of the different divisions. And so we're still finalizing those and prioritizing those. I think we're looking to hopefully come out with some new products in the very near term and show some new stuff at the Connect user conference in next year.
Scott Berg -- Needham & Company -- Analyst
Great. That's all I have. Thanks for taking my questions.
Operator
The next question comes from Kirk Materne with Evercore ISI. Kirk, your line is open.
Kirk Materne -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst
Sorry about that. Thanks. Thanks, gentlemen. Just maybe to start off with, I realized there's a lot of moving parts to the business model right now. And in terms of mix shift from on-prem to subscription and obviously, the duration changes are going to impact bookings. But can you just maybe level-set where you think you are at this point this year versus your initial expectations in January. I mean, it sounds like justice is maybe a little bit slower than you hoped maybe at the beginning of the year, other things, it sounds like you guys are very upbeat about. I'm just trying to get a level-set on kind of your expectations about how you're executing against the full-year plan and then just so we understand, because it's obviously harder to get a real view into that just by looking at bookings right now. Thanks.
John Marr -- Executive Chairman of the Board
Yeah, I think that's a good question. Obviously, there are some areas of softness in the second half of the year that have contributed a little lighter revenues and it's fair to kind of see how that breaks down. What I think is important to reinforce is our core businesses are performing really well. We indicated the enterprise side of the business is actually ahead of plan. And this is a little more mature side of the business, lot of recurring revenues, big presence in a large marketplace that flows nicely, in other words, when things move out, other things tend to move in and the business is performing very well and consistently delivering double-digit organic growth.
The justice side of the business, the core business is doing well, the competitive position, winning important deals, none of those things affected at all, and so performing very much in line with what our expectations are, IFA (ph) revenues, maintenance revenues, no attrition, all of those core fundamentals right on track.
As we've said, our core growth rate would contract, if we didn't add anything else over time. We're adding a lot of things, we've talked about Modria and re:Search and redaction and international expansion, and other things, adding Socrata and Sage in the inorganic growth initiatives that we have. Those things are going to be more difficult to predict and they're going to show up at different times and contribute, and that is what drives the above double-digit growth, organic growth rate and they're just a little light in the second half of the year.
So I think it's going to be difficult to project those even public safety that is new to Tyler and it takes several years literally to kind of Tylerize the whole business model. Well on track, but harder to predict. And so some of the softness from those growth initiatives in the second half of the year. It's important to say though that all of those being received well in the marketplace, we don't have any question about the traction we're going to receive and we've made progress in terms of these didn't have business models around them, they really didn't have a clear value proposition and those things evolve and tested and with the early adopters are being embraced. So we feel really good about the long-term contribution that these growth initiatives will have and we feel really good that they will provide that incremental growth that consistently has the growth rates where we want them to be, even though the timing of that contribution has been a little short in the second half of this year.
Kirk Materne -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst
That makes sense. Thanks, John. And then maybe in the sort of dovetails on one of your comments, but to your point about adding a lot of new products this year, you guys have obviously been more acquisitive than I think historically, listen to just the number of products you brought on. How should we be thinking about M&A for 2019 and maybe how we should think about sort of margins as it relates to that? Is 2019 more of a year where you guys are hoping to see these products sort of gel, come into the go-to-market model, and then obviously, we have to see some natural operating leverage from that? Thanks.
John Marr -- Executive Chairman of the Board
We'd always be excited to do great deals that makes sense for the Company and we have tended to be a little more aggressive on strategic deals. We're always going to be a disciplined buyer, but obviously some of these especially smaller strategics once they're embraced in our sales channel and in our customer base, and if you look out a few years -- if you now look back a few years at some of these, obviously, it certainly wouldn't have made sense not to do those deals, because they maybe were a little more expensive than what we would have liked. So you might see us be a little more aggressive on strategic deals that we think there'll be a lot of scale and leverage in, but we'll be opportunistic, we can't start 2019 and say, we have a particular target for acquisitions. If they're great, we'll do them, we'll have the capacity to do them; and if they're not, we'll be happy to be patient as well.
So it's a fair question, but we never have a quota on acquisitions. We're certainly always actively engaged in the marketplace. We're going to be able to have done a number of deals, obviously, a large deal was Socrata, but a number of smaller tuck-in strategic deals that we think have that kind of scale and leverage in the future in 2018, and we'll just have to see what 2019 brings.
Kirk Materne -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst
Thanks for that. That's it from me. Thanks.
Operator
Next question comes from Alex Zukin with Piper Jaffray. Please go ahead.
Alex Zukin -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst
Hey, guys. Thanks. So maybe just on those comments around courts and justice. If we look at kind of maybe just reminding us about what percentage of the total business is coming from courts and Justice, kind of what the new assumptions for growth given the some of the new initiatives you talked about being a little bit slower in the second-half, what's the assumption for growth there now versus where it was and are these execution issues, are these kind of product quality, market demand issues, help us categorize that? And then I've got just a quick follow-up.
Brian Miller -- Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer
Just from a percentage, courts and justice is right around 20% of our business with the whole suite of products.
Alex Zukin -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst
Yeah, I don't think -- go ahead, Lynn.
H. Lynn Moore -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director
So when you look at new assumptions for growth, I think as John said, they've got a lot of really good growth initiatives. These initiatives are being tested in the market, they're well received, the fact that there was a little bit of some delay proving out the model you look for example re:Search Illinois, this was a deal that we won in the year expecting that that was going to fire up really toward the middle of the year, and I think it's been pushed back, but not due to any other issues, just in the fact that it's a new model out there and it just hasn't gone live yet. And so in terms of assumptions for growth going forward, we believe these initiatives are going to kick in and start contributing in the future. In 2019, 2020, I would expect C&J will continue to contribute at a pretty meaningful level and have growth kick back up into the 9%, 10%, 11%, 12% range over the next couple of years.
Alex Zukin -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst
Great. And then maybe just a follow-up for Brian. Can you talk about how many points of growth Socrata contributed to that LTM bookings growth number of 18% and then how does that kind of bookings growth rate impact the prospect for continued double-digit topline growth?
Brian Miller -- Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer
Well, as you know the bookings number can be very lumpy in our business. So this quarter and actually last quarter were both quarters where bookings were comprised mostly of a lot of our good volume of our sort of normal bread and butter kinds of deals, but we didn't have any of the mega deals, the deals with contract values of $20 million or $30 million that do occur from time to time and had a couple of those last year and we have large deals in the pipeline, but their timing is somewhat random and certainly lumpy.
So again, as we have over a long period of time, we remind people to not focus too much on single quarter bookings and that would be the case this time where bookings were below last year's level. Even when you factor out the impact of the change in the term of new subscription deals, bookings were still down a bit. There was a bit of a difficult comp and there was a $12 million deal in last year's second quarter. But generally, they were down slightly, but again on the trailing 12 months basis up 17%; of that Socrata accounted for a couple percent of that trailing 12 months bookings. So that 17% growth, about 2 points of that was from Socrata. So still the longer term trailing bookings support our growth objectives that we've talked about in the sort of north of 10% range.
And also to point out that the larger bookings, the big contracts are typically recognized over several years. So the revenue recognition and the bookings are very different. So we put those into the backlog and then recognize them over the extended period of time. So the lumpiness has less of an effect on the revenue growth than it does on the bookings growth.
Alex Zukin -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst
Perfect. And then maybe just to sneak another one. I know there was some private equity kind of consolidation of assets in the market over the last quarter in your space, which was a little bit unusually large, I think, versus historical periods. Any sense or early signs of what that combined entity now looks like from a competitive standpoint, what that does to the competitive environment for new products for you guys going forward?
H. Lynn Moore -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director
Yeah. Alex, I think, we know what you're talking about. And I think we've seen it even beyond this deal, other deals, we've seen some PE firms coming into the space, I think, sort of recognizing the value of the long-term recurring revenue streams. We're obviously very familiar with those assets, the Superion assets, I think, had been in the market now three different times in 12 years. The TriTech assets have now been in the market twice in four years. It's a little bit early. Typically, we know the private equity playbook. It's a little bit different than ours. They generally look for more of an exit in the near-term, while we are looking more long-term.
Obviously, this is a different type of deal, because these two firms were merging. But typically they leverage the assets pretty strong. They look for synergies which is code for cost cutting, which can sometimes lead to a little bit of disruption in the market both with their employees and some of the customers. We probably -- we've heard a little bit anecdotally about some of that disruption, but that's about it right now. We haven't really seen any meaningful impact in the market. And other than that, we typically don't comment too much on what our competitors are doing.
Alex Zukin -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst
Great. Thank you, guys.
Operator
Next question comes from Jonathan Ho with William Blair & Company. Please go ahead.
Jonathan Ho -- William Blair & Company -- Analyst
Hi, good morning. I just wanted to get a better sense from you in order for some of the newer initiatives to pick back up our accelerate, what really has to happen here? Is this a function of having more budget set aside or education of the marketplace, just wanted to get some color in terms of maybe what the next milestones are that we should be looking for?
H. Lynn Moore -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director
Well, John, I think it's, we're talking about initiatives that are really changing the way some courts are doing business. There is a little bit of education, there's a little bit of decision-making (inaudible) when you look at something like Modria, for example, we're taking the similar approach with Modria that we did with e-filing, which is we need to get in there, we need to get some pilots going, then we need to -- then the courts adopt that, they go to more of a permissive approach and then ultimately to a mandatory approach. Same thing with re:Search, we've got some pilots out there. The reception is good, but some of these things just take some time. It's part of a function of the market we're in. The things move slowly in our market, but certainly the excitement and the energy is out there, we've got active pilots out there, we've got active interest. We've got projects going on. So it's a little bit of a function of time.
Jonathan Ho -- William Blair & Company -- Analyst
Got it. And then just in terms of my follow-up. Can you give us maybe a little bit of a sense of what's happening in the spending environment and I think you've talked about a healthy pipeline, but how should we be thinking about that just given some of the macro noise that's out there.
John Marr -- Executive Chairman of the Board
I don't think there is anything -- there's nothing really different there, Jonathan. The markets generally stay, it's going to ebb and flow a little bit, but we are not noticing anything different in the demand side of the business. I think, on the enterprise side, we think RFP and demand activity will be modestly higher this year than last year. Obviously, the justice side of the business is driven by larger deals. So it's harder to compare year-over-year, but it's steady there as well. So we haven't seen any disruption in the demand side.
Jonathan Ho -- William Blair & Company -- Analyst
Great. Thank you.
Operator
The next question comes from Rob Oliver with Baird. Please go ahead.
Rob Oliver -- Robert W. Baird -- Analyst
Hi, guys. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to ask on the R&D side of the equation, you guys entered this year with substantially higher R&D investment. We've had a lot of conversation about acquisitions on this call and it seems like you guys have made some really good ones to set you up for future growth. But on that R&D side, I just wanted to get your sense of kind of at this point of the year where you feel you are relative to the leverage you're getting on that R&D and the innovation that you're getting from it and how you might feel relative to whether that's sort of a new steady-state and how we might think about R&D spend going forward. Thank you.
John Marr -- Executive Chairman of the Board
Yeah, Rob. I think where we are with R&D right now is, as we've noted before, we've got a lot of projects going on, they are spanning the entire portfolio of our products. We're pleased with where that development is. As you know, it takes time. Once we start that development, it takes time to get the products out, get them into RFPs, get them showing. So we're pleased with the progress of where they are today, and what we think they'll drive down the road.
As we look out going farther, as you know, we have done some acquisitions. Typically, what we do with acquisitions is we bring them in and we actually invest in them. We've got a pretty good history of that. We talked earlier about some deals in the comments about ExecuTime, that's an acquisition we bought a couple years ago. We took a very deliberate approach to investing in it, and here we are couple of years later and it's starting to really contribute. We've made some significant acquisitions this year, obviously Socrata. We're just now beginning the planning phase for 2019, but when we make an acquisition like Socrata and we think where there's leverage across our base, it's likely we will be making some significant investments there. But the amount and the timing of those, we haven't worked out yet.
Brian Miller -- Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer
And I wouldn't expect that R&D expense, the gross expense goes backwards next year, but we do believe that if you look out over an extended period of time, over the next several years that we do see leverage over the long-term in R&D as we're able to invest, leverage investments across multiple products and ultimately be more efficient about that. So in the near-term we're opportunistic as we are with M&A on R&D and those two play together as well depending on as we make various build versus buy decisions and how we allocate the capital between R&D and M&A.
Rob Oliver -- Robert W. Baird -- Analyst
Okay. Thank you, guys.
Operator
The next question comes from Patrick Walravens with JMP. Please go ahead.
Pete Lowry -- JMP securities -- Analyst
Hi, it's Pete Lowry in for Pat. Can you talk a bit about whether your go-to-market or sales motion is different as you sell suite solutions like courts and justice?
John Marr -- Executive Chairman of the Board
No, it's more of a coordination, we're kind of working through that, but we will continue to maintain separate sales channels, there's a high level of expertise, domain knowledge and relationships that exist in the different channels. So again, the skill set, the relationship that somebody on the justice side of the business has is going to be very different than somebody selling an enterprise financial system or tax and appraisal solution.
So we will keep -- I think, we have consolidated the channels to the extent we will, we look at it, hey, if you built this organically from scratch, what would you have? And I don't think you'd have a single sales rep selling a courts solution, as well as a tax solution, you would draw the lines pretty much to where we would evolve.
So at this point, what's critical is to have sales executives that take the lead. So that while we have several different people with domain expertise in the different areas that are going to talk the language and understand the needs of the different areas of the solution that we certainly appear at the cohesive, comprehensive sales channel when we're representing multi-suite solutions and that's really where the evolution and the changes take place now. So I don't see the channels changing much. I think that the coordination of those and establishing leads that are able to present the solution, negotiate a contract, deliver services in a comprehensive way is where we are in the evolution at this point in time.
Pete Lowry -- JMP securities -- Analyst
Great. Thanks. One quick follow-up; how should we think about Q4 cash flows? Did some of the outperformance in Q3 pull from Q4 or would that be sort of normal sequential pattern?
Brian Miller -- Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer
I think the sequential pattern would be pretty normal. Q3 is always our biggest quarter. It was a little bit better than I think we would have expected. So I don't think our outlook for the -- so some of that may have been some timing Q3 versus Q4, but Q4 is also a relatively strong period for cash flow. So I don't think our view for the full-year has really changed from what we were seeing prior to this quarter.
Pete Lowry -- JMP securities -- Analyst
Great. Thank you.
Operator
The next question comes from Tim Klasell with Northland Securities. Please go head.
Tim Klasell -- Northland Securities -- Analyst
Hey, guys. I wanted to jump a little bit into the comments you made around more complex and potentially longer, harder to predict sales cycle. In particular, I did a little bit of dig with the Lubbock, Texas and that seems to be a sort of a great example of what you can do with some cross-selling. But can you walk us through the longer sales cycles, what that means on the calendar, what you saw before and after and I'm sure your selling to more departments inside of the government, so it takes longer. But wondering if you can give us some, maybe a little bit of color around how much longer it is taking.
John Marr -- Executive Chairman of the Board
So actually I think what we need to do is clarify what we said. I don't think we're really seeing longer sales cycles. So for our core traditional products, I don't think anything has really changed there in terms of the sales process of the cycle. What we're referring to is, it's taking longer for the market to adopt these newer initiatives that we have, Modria, re:Search, redaction, these sorts of things. So it's not the traditional sales cycles that we've seen lengthening, it's just these new products that are being embraced by the marketplace and from the value proposition, all those things encouraging, but it's taking a little longer for those adoption rates to go up and to see the revenues come online. So it's really more aligned with the growth initiatives, rather than the traditional sales cycles.
Tim Klasell -- Northland Securities -- Analyst
Okay, OK. And then just a quick follow-on; a lot of your contracts, I believe, would have some sort of inflationary clause in there when the contracts renew or maybe on an annual basis. Can you walk us through what those are generally geared to, are they to the CPI, do you have a fixed rate or if we do enter into a high inflationary environment, how are those contracts protected roughly speaking?
John Marr -- Executive Chairman of the Board
Some of them are CPI, some of them just a flat percentage and some of them, the initial engagement is flat for the term of the initial engagement. So it's a competitive marketplace and we negotiate what we can. That's probably the driving reason for what Brian referred to which is a conscious shortening of these initial cycles. So originally, as some of the SaaS solutions were newer and even originally we used to kind of capitalize into the relationship, the service component in the markets kind of matured and settled into paying services for the initial deployment and just having the subscription fee before, say, hosting and product licensing and maintenance. So those things evolving the shorter cycle with hardly any attrition at all doesn't give anything up for us and it gets us to a point where we can just let the market determine the increases, and as you're indicating, not have the inflationary exposure. The three years we're down about 3.5, 3.4 years or something that's pretty short period of time, and after that for most of these, they just go to whatever the appropriate market rate is. So the exposure I think is becoming more and more limited.
Brian Miller -- Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer
And Tim, even in deal where there is a three-year agreement, for example, that has a flat fee for that initial term, the economics of the deal would still have the annual increases built into those, but the payment is just an average payment. So even though optically, it may look like there is no growth from those revenues over three years, the economic still have built-in increases in it, but we do want to, as John said, limit the long-term exposure to fixed contracts and give us the flexibility with pricing, there's cost change.
John Marr -- Executive Chairman of the Board
You need to look at the whole customer base to -- I think, you said higher recurring -- annualized recurring revenue rates are, what, somewhere mid $600 million now. Certainly a high percentage of that -- lot of these thousands of clients have been acquired over many, many years. So the vast majority of that number are people that are on annual contracts. We certainly aren't looking to increase them at any unusual rate, but should there be inflation exposure, there aren't any limitations at all. It's only those contracts from the last few years that are in there. And again, that's a relatively small percent.
Brian Miller -- Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer
Virtually all of our maintenance agreements are annual agreements, it's rare that we have multi-year maintenance agreements.
Tim Klasell -- Northland Securities -- Analyst
Okay. Great. Thank you very much for the color.
Operator
(Operator Instructions) The next question comes from Mark Schappel with Benchmark. Please go ahead.
Mark Schappel -- The Benchmark Company -- Analyst
Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my question. Just one question, John, on international expansion, it was touched on in your prepared remarks as part of the growth strategy. I was wondering if you could just remind us real quickly here where the Company is at with respect to your expansion efforts overseas?
John Marr -- Executive Chairman of the Board
Yeah, it's predominantly right now courts and justice, so those solutions, and it's predominantly English-speaking places. So some in Europe and obviously the first deployments have been in Australia. So that continues to kind of be the case. We have some things going on in South America, but for the most part it's English-speaking courts and justice solutions.
Mark Schappel -- The Benchmark Company -- Analyst
Great. Thank you.
Operator
At this time, there appears to be no more questions. Mr. Marr, I'll turn the call back over to you for closing remarks.
John Marr -- Executive Chairman of the Board
Okay. Thank you. Appreciate you all joining us on the earnings call today. If there are any further questions, feel free to reach out to Brian, Lynn or myself. Again, thanks for joining us and have a great day.
Operator
This conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
Duration: 23 minutes
Call participants:
John Marr -- Executive Chairman of the Board
Brian Miller -- Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer
H. Lynn Moore -- President, Chief Executive Officer, Director
Peter Heckmann -- D.A. Davidson -- Analyst
Scott Berg -- Needham & Company -- Analyst
Kirk Materne -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst
Alex Zukin -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst
Jonathan Ho -- William Blair & Company -- Analyst
Rob Oliver -- Robert W. Baird -- Analyst
Pete Lowry -- JMP securities -- Analyst
Tim Klasell -- Northland Securities -- Analyst
Mark Schappel -- The Benchmark Company -- Analyst
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