Roper Technologies Q3 2025 Earnings Report

Roper Technologies EPS Results

• Actual EPS: $5.14
• Consensus EPS: $5.11
• Beat/Miss: Beat by +$0.03
• One Year Ago EPS: $4.62

Roper Technologies Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $2.02 billion
• Expected Revenue: $2.02 billion
• Beat/Miss: Missed by -$180.00 thousand
• YoY Revenue Growth: +14.30%

Roper Technologies Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q3 2025
• Date: 10/23/2025
• Time: Before Market Opens
• Conference Call Date: Thursday, October 23, 2025
• Conference Call Time: 8:00AM ET

Roper Technologies (NASDAQ:ROP) is a diversified technology company that develops and acquires software and engineered products for global niche markets. Through a series of targeted acquisitions, the company has built a portfolio spanning application software, network software, measurement and analytical solutions, process technologies and radio frequency products. Roper’s businesses serve critical end markets such as healthcare, transportation and logistics, water and environmental, education, energy, and manufacturing, offering solutions designed to enhance efficiency, compliance and productivity.

Within its application software segment, Roper provides cloud-based and on-premise systems for vertical markets, including healthcare information systems, education administration platforms and supply chain management software. Flagship offerings include laboratory information systems for clinical and anatomical pathology labs, student information management systems for K-12 districts, and collaborative commerce platforms for foodservice distribution. In its network software segment, the company delivers enterprise resource planning, practice management and data analytics tools to legal, professional services and real estate firms.

Roper’s measurement and analytical solutions groups design precision instruments for flow measurement, environmental monitoring, medical diagnostics and semiconductor fabrication, while its process technologies business manufactures engineered products such as metal and polymer pumps and valves. The radio frequency products division supplies cable and antenna monitoring equipment for broadband and wireless networks. Across all segments, Roper emphasizes recurring revenue models—principally subscriptions, maintenance agreements and consumable sales—to drive long-term cash flow visibility.

Headquartered in Sarasota, Florida, Roper Technologies traces its roots back to the early 1980s and has grown through disciplined, acquisition-driven expansion into a global enterprise serving customers in North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. The company is led by President and Chief Executive Officer Brian J. Frey, who joined Roper in 2009 and previously held senior finance roles before assuming the top executive position in 2021. Under his leadership, Roper continues to pursue operational excellence, technological innovation and strategic bolt-on acquisitions to strengthen its position in high-value markets.

Roper Technologies Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: Strong Q3 results: total revenue grew 14%, organic revenue 6%, EBITDA +13% and free cash flow up 17% with a TTM free cash flow margin of 32%.
• Positive Sentiment: Management positions AI as a durable growth driver with early proof points across the portfolio (CentralReach ~75% bookings AI-enabled, Deltek >40 AI features, DAT AI freight automation), though material commercial impact is expected to build more into 2027.
• Positive Sentiment: Board authorized a $3 billion open-ended share repurchase and the company says it has north of $5 billion capacity for M&A over the next 12 months, giving multiple levers for shareholder returns and deal-making.
• Negative Sentiment: Near-term headwinds: a government shutdown paused Deltek GovCon deal activity and a new copper tariff caused order timing delays at Neptune, prompting a narrowed full-year organic revenue guide to ~6% and softer Q4 outlooks.
• Neutral Sentiment: Active capital deployment: $1.3 billion spent this quarter (Subsplash $800M plus $500M of tuck-ins) including Convoy — management calls Convoy strategically important despite current unprofitability and expects attractive returns over several years.

Presentation

[Operator]

Good morning. The Roper Technologies conference call will now begin. Today's call is being recorded. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero on your touch-tone telephone. I would now like to turn the call over to Zach Moxcey, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Zach Moxcey, VP of Investor Relations at Roper Technologies]

Good morning, and thank you all for joining us as we discuss the third quarter 2025 financial results for Roper Technologies. Joining me on the call this morning are Neil Hunn, President and Chief Executive Officer; Jason Conley, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Brandon Cross, Vice President and Principal Accounting Officer; and Shannon O'Callaghan, Senior Vice President of Finance. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release announcing our financial results. The press release also includes replay information for today's call. We have prepared slides to accompany today's call, which are available through the webcast and are also available on our website. Now, if you please turn to page two, we begin with our safe harbor statement.

[Zach Moxcey, VP of Investor Relations at Roper Technologies]

During the course of today's call, we will make forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties as described on this page in our press release and in our SEC filings. You should listen to today's call in the context of that information. Now, if you please turn to page three. Today, we will discuss our results primarily on an adjusted, non-GAAP, and continuing operations basis. For the third quarter, the difference between our GAAP results and adjusted results consists of the following items, amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets, transaction-related expenses associated with completed acquisitions, and lastly, financial impacts associated with our minority investment in Indicor. Reconciliations can be found in our press release and in the appendix of this presentation on our website.

[Zach Moxcey, VP of Investor Relations at Roper Technologies]

Now, if you please turn to page four, I'll hand the call over to Neil. After our prepared remarks, we will take questions from our telephone participants. Neil?

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Thank you, Zach, and thanks to everyone for joining us. I'm excited to be with you this morning. As we turn to page four, you'll see the topics we plan to cover today. We'll start with our third quarter highlights and financial results. Next, we'll review our segment performance, our AI progress and momentum, and our most recent set of bolt-on acquisitions. I'll get into our guidance details and, of course, wrap up with your questions. With that, let's go ahead and get started. Next slide, please. Turning to page five, let me run through the four key takeaways for today's call. First, we had a strong third quarter. Total revenue grew 14%, organic revenue grew 6%, software bookings grew in the high singles area. We continued to deliver impressive free cash flow, with free cash flow growing 17%.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Of note, free cash flow margins posted at 32% for the TTM period. Really impressive financial results. Second, we're super encouraged by the progress and momentum we're seeing across all of our businesses as it relates to our AI enablement and our product stacks and our internal operations, and more on this in a moment. Third, we're announcing today our first share repurchase authorization, $3 billion in total. Lastly, we continue to execute on our M&A strategy of acquiring faster growth platforms and bolt-on or tuck-in acquisitions at a high fidelity rate. In the quarter, we deployed $1.3 billion, $800 million for Subsplash, which we detailed this time last quarter, and $500 million on a series of tuck-in acquisitions. Also, more on this later, but worth highlighting here, we are very encouraged by this recent capital deployment execution and the future growth potential that's being layered into our enterprise.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Importantly, we remain very well positioned for the continued execution of our M&A strategy and continue to have north of $5 billion of capital deployment capacity available over the next 12 months or so. As I turn the call over to Jason, reflecting on the quarter, I'm quite bullish on most of what we're seeing. A very strong 3Q, real demonstrable AI progress, which is a long-term growth driver for us, excellent execution of our higher growth, higher returning capital deployment strategy, and the announcement of our first ever buyback authorization. This all bodes very well for the future. That said, we'd like to see some of our markets start to cooperate a bit better, namely the government contracting and trade markets, and we have some delays at Neptune. Much more on this as we walk through today's call.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

With that, let me turn the call over to Jason to talk through our P&L and our balance sheet.

[Jason Conley, EVP and CFO at Roper Technologies]

Thanks, Neil. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. I'm pleased to take you through our third quarter results and strong financial position. Turning to page six, Q3 and TTM results reflect the long-term financial profile of Roper, which is to compound cash flow in the mid-teens area. We'll start with revenue, which was 14% over prior year and surpassed the $2 billion mark. Acquisitions contributed 8%, led by the final quarter of Transact before it turns organic, and CentralReach, which we acquired in April of this year. Of note, these businesses are tracking very well against our acquisition expectations. We printed 6% organic growth, both for the consolidated enterprise and across each of our three segments. Our application and network software segments were in line with expectations, while TEP was a bit below given near-term timing at Neptune, which Neil will discuss further.

[Jason Conley, EVP and CFO at Roper Technologies]

EBITDA of $810 million was 13% over prior year, with EBITDA margin of 40.2%. Core margins expanded 10 basis points, and segment core margins expanded 30 basis points, led by our software segments. DEPS of $5.14 was 11% over prior year and $0.02 above the high end of our guidance range, despite absorbing $0.05 of dilution from Q3 acquisitions that were not reflected in previous guidance. Free cash flow was outstanding at $842 million, up 17% over prior year and representing 32% of revenue on a TTM basis. Our software businesses captured strong renewals, and we drove great working capital performance across the board. Broadening out a bit, TTM cash flow of over $2.4 billion is a 17% CAGR over a three-year period. For those looking at per share metrics, you'll note that our share count has compounded at about 0.5% over that same time period.

[Jason Conley, EVP and CFO at Roper Technologies]

At Roper, we have been and will continue to be relentlessly focused on cash flow and shareholder value creation. Now, let's turn to slide seven and discuss our very strong financial position. Our net debt to EBITDA stands at three times, which is up only modestly from Q2 at 2.9 times, despite deploying $1.3 billion towards acquisitions. This places us in a great position with over $5 billion in next 12-month capacity for capital deployment. Regarding M&A: you can see that we've been quite active this year in acquiring high-quality growth businesses and several strategic bolt-ons. This is against the backdrop of a muted PE deal environment. The pipeline of high-quality acquisitions continues to build as assets mature in PE portfolios, and a return of capital to LPs becomes paramount. Additionally, as Neil mentioned, we're pleased to announce another capital appointment lever that was previously unavailable.

[Jason Conley, EVP and CFO at Roper Technologies]

Our board has authorized a $3 billion share repurchase program with an open-ended time period to execute. While M&A will continue to be the majority of our capital deployment allocation, our share repurchase program will allow us to opportunistically complement our M&A program. Over the last year or two, we have talked about the great business building taking place across the Roper portfolio, from strategy to talent to execution, all now greatly turbocharged by AI. Our repurchase program reflects both confidence in our strategy and our commitment to delivering long-term shareholder value. I'll turn it back over to Neil to talk about our segment performance. Neil.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Thanks, Jason. Turning to page eight, and before we get into our segment details, we want to discuss why AI is a powerful and durable growth driver for Roper. To start, AI represents a meaningful expansion of our TAM across the portfolio. We can now deliver transformational software solutions that automate labor-intensive work adjacent to our existing platforms. This creates substantial new value streams for our customers and correspondingly facilitates long-term growth for Roper and our businesses. Importantly, our businesses are uniquely positioned to win in AI, in fact, having a very high right to win in the AI world. Our software solutions are deeply embedded system-of-record applications with workflow-oriented domain-specific architectures. The decades of cumulative workflow knowledge built into our platforms, combined with the proprietary vertical market data, provide the precise context needed to develop agentic AI solutions.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Because of this, our businesses have an exceptionally high right to win as we deploy these capabilities across our VMS and markets. Internally, we're becoming AI-native across all functions to drive productivity gains. We're excited to reinvest these gains to further accelerate our product development and go-to-market initiatives. It's important to note we've always had more great ideas than resources needed to execute, and AI has the potential to attack this challenge. Finally, we have tangible proof points, though it's still early. Aderant has claimed a technology leadership position in legal tech, accelerating their bookings growth. CentralReach now has roughly 75% of their bookings attributed to AI-enabled products, which have automated $100 million reimbursement rule evaluations, over 3.5 million learner appointments, and over 1 million clinical summaries being generated. Great real-world examples of the power of AI.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Deltek has released over 40 AI features into their cloud offerings, driving increased cloud conversion activity. DAT has industry-leading AI/ML-enabled freight matching capabilities, which I'll detail shortly. These are but a few examples from across the portfolio. Very exciting times for sure. With that, let's now turn to our segment reviews, starting with page 10 and our application software segment. Revenue for the quarter grew by 18% in total, and organic revenue grew by 6%. EBITDA margins were 43.4%, and core margins improved 40 basis points in the quarter. Starting with Deltek, Deltek delivered solid performance in the quarter, with particularly strong results in their private sector end markets. Construction, architecture, and engineering remain robust throughout. The GovCom business experienced softness in September as agencies paused activity ahead of the pending government shutdown. This timing is unfortunate.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Pipeline activity and commercial momentum had been building nicely following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill in July, and we were seeing increased engagement across our customer base heading into the new fiscal year. The fundamentals remain strong. The OB3 authorized significant increases in defense and infrastructure spending that will flow through to our customers once appropriations are finalized. This is simply a timing issue, not a demand issue. Finally, retention levels across the entire Deltek franchise remain very high. Aderant continues to be incredibly strong and continues to post impressive bookings and recurring revenue growth. The booking strength is broad-based, fueled by their AI-enabled solutions, especially as it relates to AI-enabled compliant time capture and billing, and as a combination of market share gains, cloud migration, and SaaS growth. Vertafore continues once again to be steady and solid for us.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

We continue to see consistent ARR growth and strong customer retention and strength across their agency, MGA, and carrier solutions. This growth is enabled by their strong go-to-market capabilities and their long-term commitment to product strength. PowerPlan's performance has been terrific. Their success is the result of several years of business building in the product stack, the go-to-market capabilities, their service delivery, really across all functions. In addition, to remind everyone, they serve power generation customers, which are adding capacity as quickly as possible to handle the AI workloads. The setup here should be quite good for a long time. Also, in the quarter, we completed the acquisition of Orchard, a tuck-in acquisition for our Clinisys business. Orchard brings additional clinical laboratory capability to Clinisys, with particular strength in reference, physician offerings, and public health labs. Finally, the balance of our application software portfolio continues to execute very well.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

CentralReach was awesome again in the quarter, driving accelerating adoption of their AI tools and capturing ABA therapy capacity additions. Procare made a great installment of progress, with new bookings continuing to be strong, posting low double-digit growth in payments with improved gross margins, though still work to do, in particular with faster implementation timeframes and share wallet expansion. Meaningful progress for sure. Finally, Strata and Transact were steady and solid in the quarter. As we look to the final quarter of the year, we expect to deliver mid-single-digit organic revenue growth. This outlook reflects high single-digit growth in our recurring revenue base, offset by declines in non-recurring revenue, primarily due to anticipated softness in our Deltek business stemming from the ongoing government shutdown.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Given the uncertainty surrounding the duration and impact of the shutdown, we see potential outcomes across the full range of our MSD outlook, from the lower to the higher end. Our businesses in this segment continue to compete and execute exceptionally well. The primary variable remains a higher level of market uncertainty than we typically experience for a Deltek business. Please turn with us to page 11. Total revenue in our network segment grew 13% and organic revenue 6% in the quarter. EBITDA margins remain strong at 53.7%, with core margins improving 60 basis points. As we dig into the individual businesses, we'll start with DAT. DAT was solid in the quarter and had strong RFP improvements. DAT continues to execute exceptionally well on their core strategy of driving enhanced network value for both brokers and carriers.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

This dual-sided approach positions DAT to better monetize their entire network ecosystem, and more on this when we turn to the next page. ConstructConnect was solid again for us in the quarter. Their growth was fueled by strong customer bookings activity and improved customer net retention. Of note, this business continues to make good progress with their emerging AI-enabled takeoff and estimating solution. Foundry is turning the corner on growth, posting continued sequential improvements in ARR, and we expect their Q4 exit ARR to grow year over year in the HSD area. Really happy for the team there as they've had to work through some tough market conditions. Next, our network healthcare businesses, MHA, SHP, and SoftWriters were very good in the quarter.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Of particular note, SoftWriters is executing at an exceptional level, winning a few very large pharmacy customers and making substantial progress on a high-impact AI solution, which is being beta tested in the market currently. Congrats to Scott and his entire team for their success. Finally, Subsplash, our most recent acquisition that closed on July 25, is off to a great start, delivering financial results in line with our deal model expectations. Of note, they saw very good market traction with their AI-driven sermon content offering, Pulpit AI, as they deepened its integration with their core engagement platform, driving strong product-led growth. Exciting stuff. As we turn to the outlook for the final quarter of the year, we expect to see organic revenue growth at the higher end of the mid-singles area.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

As we turn to page 12, we'd like to spend a few minutes describing the strategic evolution of our DAT business and why we're so excited about its future growth prospects. To start, our legacy DAT platform is the largest freight matching network across the U.S. and Canada. The scale is remarkable. Over 1.2 million loads posted and 15 million rate views every single day. DAT is the clear market leader, delivering tremendous value to both freight brokers and carriers, both of whom pay to participate in this powerful network. As strong as the legacy business is, we're even more bullish about where DAT is headed. To bring this vision to life, DAT is building capabilities across the entire freight automation workflow, from carrier vetting to broker-carrier matching to AI-driven rate negotiation, load management tracking, and finally payment and settlement.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Through deep customer partnering with the brokerage community, DAT is working to fully automate the freight matching process. As this happens, DAT will generate $100 to $200 per load in savings for brokers, while giving carriers greater predictability and faster payments on their invoices. What sets DAT apart is this end-to-end product capability and its role as a neutral, trusted partner, a Switzerland-like player that equally serves the entire freight brokerage market. This is a truly unique position in the market. This evolution also highlights the Roper-DAT partnership at its best. We work closely with the DAT team to craft this strategy, then we execute a focused M&A program to strengthen it through three strategic tuck-ins, Trucker Tools, Outgo, and Convoy. With the deals complete, DAT is now fully focused on delivering against this strategic opportunity.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Important to note, Convoy is an unusual transaction for us as it currently is not profitable, but we expect the financial returns over the next several years to be extremely attractive. The key to success is scaling efficiently, leveraging DAT's advantaged customer unit economics for both brokers and carriers to drive sustained growth and profitability. We are confident in this strategy, market position, and DAT's ability to execute. I know this was a bit of a deep dive, but we wanted to share with you why we're so excited about the growth opportunity that sits in front of DAT, true AI-based freight automation. Now let's turn to page 13 and review our TEP segment's quarterly results. Total revenue here grew 7%, and organic revenue grew 6%. EBITDA margins came in at 35.2%. Let's start with Neptune.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

As we've said before, Neptune continues to execute really well, particularly around its ultrasonic meter strategy, and we're seeing strong traction in its data and software billing solutions. The new copper tariff that took effect on August 1st caused some short-term disruption. Neptune responded by implementing surcharges to offset the tariff's impact, which temporarily slowed order timing. These actions reflect the benefit of being part of Roper, doing the right long-term thing for customers and the business, even when it creates near-term headwinds. Verathon continues to perform well. In particular, during the quarter, Verathon saw continued strength in its single-use recurring product lines, both B-Flex and GlideScope, which remain key growth drivers. NDI also delivered an excellent quarter. As we discussed previously, NDI provides proprietary, world-class precision measurement technologies to a range of healthcare OEMs.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

These technologies in turn enable guidance-enabled solutions across multiple clinical markets, including orthopedic surgery, interventional radiology, and cardiac ablation. Finally, we saw strong execution and growth across CIVCO, FMI, Inovonics, IPA, and rf IDEAS, rounding out a solid overall performance for this group of companies. Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, we expect organic growth in the low single-digit area, given the very difficult prior year comp and the timing we discussed at Neptune. Now let's turn to page 15 and review our Q4 and updated full-year 2025 guidance. Starting with the full-year outlook, we continue to expect total revenue to remain in the 13% area. Also, given the delays at Neptune and the temporary impact of the government shutdown, which is slowing year-end commercial activity at Deltek, we now expect organic revenue to land in the 6% area versus our previous 6%-7% range.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Relative to our full-year DEPS outlook, we're tightening guidance to the high end of our prior range after adjusting for $0.10 of dilution from the $500 million of tuck-in acquisitions completed during the quarter. Specifically, we're now expecting adjusted DEPS to be in the range of $1,990 and $1,995. We expect to see our tax rate at the lower end of our 21% to 22% area for the full year. For the fourth quarter, we're establishing adjusted DEPS guidance to be between $511 and $516, which includes $0.05 of dilution for last quarter's tuck-in deals. Now please turn with us to page 16, and we'll open it up to your questions. We'll conclude with the same key takeaways with which we started. First, we had a very good third quarter with exceptional free cash flow.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Second, we're super excited about the pace of AI innovation and the growth potential in front of our enterprise. Third, we're announcing a $3 billion authorization for a share repurchase. Finally, we remain super well positioned for further M&A activity. Relative to our financial results, we grew total revenue 14% and organic revenue 6%, grew EBITDA 13%, and delivered 17% free cash flow growth in the quarter. AI is a significant growth driver for Roper, expanding our TAMs by automating tasks and work across our vertical market offerings. With deep workflow integration, proprietary data, and vertical market-specific architectures, our businesses are well positioned to succeed in AI, in fact, have a very high right to win and are already seeing measurable yet early product and commercial results. DAT exemplifies this strategy in action, evolving from a traditional freight matching network to a fully automated freight marketplace powered by AI.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Through this transformation, DAT is unlocking significant efficiency and economic value for brokers and carriers alike, positioning itself for improved high-quality growth. As Jason mentioned earlier, we're excited to announce a $3 billion share purchase authorization, which we will deploy opportunistically, enabling us to take advantage of dislocations in the market. We're super confident with our talent advantage, our strategy, and our execution capabilities, and this first-ever buyback is evidence of such. Importantly, we remain exceptionally well positioned to execute our M&A strategy. We have north of $5 billion of available firepower over the next 12 months and a very active, large, and attractive pipeline of opportunities. Importantly, Roper continues to strengthen its position as an acquirer of choice for both target CEOs and their private equity owners. As always, we'll pursue these opportunities with our consistent, unbiased, patient, and disciplined approach.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Prior to turning to your questions, and if you could flip to the final slide, our strategic compounding flywheel, we'd like to remind everyone that what we do as Roper is simple. We compound cash flow over a long arc of time by executing a low-risk strategy and running our dual-threat offense. First, we have a proven, powerful business model that begins with operating a portfolio of market-leading, application-specific, and vertically oriented businesses. Once a company is part of Roper, we operate a decentralized environment so our businesses can compete and win based on customer intimacy. We coach our businesses on how to structurally improve their long-term and sustainable organic growth rates and underlying business quality.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Second, we run a centralized, process-driven capital appointment strategy that focuses in a deliberate and disciplined manner on cultivating, curating, and acquiring the next great vertical market-leading business or tuck-in acquisition to add to our cash flow compounding flywheel. Taken together, we compound our cash flow over a long arc of time in the mid-teens area, meaning we double our cash flow every five years or so. With that, we'd like to thank you for your continued interest and support and open the call to your questions.

[Operator]

Thank you. We will now go to our question and answer portion of the call. We request that our callers limit their question to one main question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, you may do so by pressing the star key followed by the digit one on your touch-tone telephone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then the digit two. Again, we request that callers limit their questions to one main question and one follow-up. Your first question comes from the line of George Kurosawa with Citi. Please go ahead.

[George Kurosawa, Equity Research Analyst at Citi]

Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. Great to be on the call here. I wanted to first touch on kind of the high-level organic growth picture. I think you can take a step back this quarter, but I think you can certainly argue there's some one-time or short-term dynamics at play here. Maybe just if you could frame your confidence in a re-acceleration from here, particularly as we start to sharpen our pencils for 2026. Thanks.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for being on the call this morning. I think you're right. The reason that was a little rough this quarter were the two reasons we talked about: the commercial activity at Deltek with the government shutdown and then this tariff-related impact at Neptune. As we think about 2026, it's a little early for us to get super detailed about 2026, but if you sort of roll, sort of segment by segment, it's been pretty, in application, it's been pretty consistent trends there throughout 2025. You know, Deltek and government contracting should improve next year. Given the passage of OB3, I think the timing of when that improves is still up in the air a little bit. We'll see that as we get through our planning and roll in the next year. There's definite improvement happening in that market given the spending attached to OB3.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

In the network segment, it's been pretty consistent over the last three quarters. There was a comp thing in the first quarter, so pretty consistent over the last three quarters, despite the headwinds in the freight market. We'll have to see how the freight market evolves next year, but really like the business building we're doing at DAT, as I talked about. As I also mentioned, Foundry is going to be better next year. On TEP, the Neptune order patterns likely continue normalizing to the pre-COVID lead time levels. Orders there have been pretty good. It's just the lead time, and the lead times are going to continue to shorten. MDI is poised for a couple of strong years, but we really need to get through our planning process to have more clarity on how TEP's going to play out next year.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

All in all, I feel pretty good about the trends in GovCon, Foundry, CentralReach, and Subsplash turning organic in the second half of next year and the general business building. As usual, we go through a pretty exhaustive Q4 planning process, which we kick off in a couple of weeks.

[George Kurosawa, Equity Research Analyst at Citi]

Okay, that's super helpful color. Maybe one quick follow-up here on the AI strategy. I think you disclosed 25 products last quarter. I'm curious if you have an updated number just to give us a sense for the pace of innovation and just more generally how you feel businesses are coming up the AI curve here.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, we feel very, very good. I won't rehash all the prepared comments about why we feel that way. We're going from having a large number of products and key features. We talked about the 40 AI features in the Deltek core that's driving the cloud migrations and SaaS. Increasingly, we're seeing AI SKUs. We feel real good about that. Now we've got to get through the commercial activities, or at least these SKUs, across essentially every one of our software businesses now and in the first half of next year. We've got to go sell them and commercialize them, and the momentum will pick up from there. We feel very good, very high right to win. A lot of compounding of knowledge about how to do all this stuff internally. You can hire some talent, but you got to build it. We feel real good about that.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

A lot of internal sharing that's going on, which is great to see. A lot of momentum. We can certainly talk more about that, but feel great about where we are on the AI front.

[George Kurosawa, Equity Research Analyst at Citi]

Great. Thanks for taking the questions.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Appreciate it.

[Operator]

The next question comes from the line of Brent Thill with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

[Brent Thill, Research Analyst at Jefferies]

Thanks. Good morning. Just on the buyback, I guess maybe walk through the strategy. Why not leaning harder into M&A versus, I believe this is your first buyback ever. What drove that decision?

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, I appreciate it. Good morning. Just to be clear on what it is, it's $3 billion. It's open-ended timing. It's opportunistic in no way, shape, or form to change our strategy. Set this in the context of the amount of capital we have to deploy over the next three years is somewhere in the $15 billion to $20 billion range. It's not a change in any way, shape, or form. The rationale for it is pretty straightforward. We just have a ton of conviction in what we're doing, and in terms of the talent we have on the team and that lead our companies, the strategies, the AI execution, the general continuous improvement execution, the business building we're doing, and we think this buyback is just clear evidence and support for our conviction there. We're going to maintain a strong bias towards M&A.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

The compounding nature of the numerator is better than the denominator. It's just straight math. We're super active on the M&A front. We cultivate every day. In fact, our Janet Glazer, who leads our capital deployment efforts, had a fantastic meeting three or four weeks ago, I think, with 18 CEOs of companies that are in the pipeline, so a marketing event. This was met with great reviews, and we're really becoming sort of a buyer of choice, both for the CEOs of companies and also the private equity sellers. We feel real good about the execution of our M&A strategy, and this buyback is just a small complement to the overall strategy at Roper.

[Brent Thill, Research Analyst at Jefferies]

Okay. Neil, I know the last couple of years we've had a couple things that maybe haven't gone the way you wanted to. The question is just how do you de-risk this out of the guide? I think investors have looked at the portfolio and said that you get the diversification aspect, but why do we keep having kind of the setbacks if we're that diverse? That's the question I'm getting.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, so you're right. I mean, we built this portfolio to essentially take as much cyclicality and cycle risk as you can take out of an enterprise. If you look back over our long history, before we sold and divested all the industrial businesses, we'd cycle up or down 5 to 10 points. Now we're cycling like a point here or there. We've essentially beaten out, ostensibly, all the cycle risk you can in an enterprise. In this case, it's just frustratingly bespoke situations. Government contracting, normally you're in GovTech because of the stability of the enterprise, of the end market. Here it's been anything but that the last couple of years. Transportation, who would have predicted like a three-year freight recession? It is frustrating these things are stacking on top of each other, but they're bespoke, and we like the construct of the portfolio, for sure.

[Jason Conley, EVP and CFO at Roper Technologies]

I think the cash flow generation continues to be strong and consistent with what we thought. Obviously, we've had some new deals come in that have been diluted, but we've been able to sort of push through that. Our guidance is adjusted for dilution is pretty close to where we were before. You know, despite some of the softness we've seen, we've been able to sort of maintain the bottom.

[Brent Thill, Research Analyst at Jefferies]

Thanks.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

You bet.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Brad Reback with Stifel. Please go ahead.

[Brad Reback, Managing Director at Stifel]

Great. Thanks very much. Software bookings decelerated a little bit sequentially, I think from the mid-teens to the high singles. Was that predominantly Deltek, or were there other drivers there?

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, it was mainly Deltek, a little bit of Frontline. We've talked about some of the funding from the DOE. We don't get a ton of funding down to the states, but at the margin, it does slow down a little bit in K-12. Yeah, it's Deltek, Frontline. Outside of that, it's very strong. If you look on a TTM, it's also a very lumpy dynamic, right? Software bookings can be lumpy quarter to quarter. TTM is up, low double digits, so, you know, feel good about that trend. I would also just call out that healthcare has been particularly strong this quarter. Our Strata business, you know, we combined Strata and Syntellis a couple of years ago, and that's really starting to take hold in the market. Bookings are really strong there.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Actually, our Clinisys business is doing quite well too in Europe and even in the U.S. with some of the bolt-ons we've done for them to get outside of the hospital. That's starting to gain traction as well. Just some color behind the bookings this quarter.

[Brad Reback, Managing Director at Stifel]

Great. Neil, I think two questions ago, you talked about the rollout of the AI SKUs happening now through the first half of 2026 and then needing to sell it. That all seems like we should be thinking about this more of a 2027 and beyond, organic driver as opposed to 2026. Thanks.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

I think that's a fair, we're certainly viewing it that way. I think it's a fair assumption. We'll certainly see progress in bookings throughout next year because we're, again, this is across, you know, 20 plus software companies and multiple products across 20 software companies. We'll see building momentum. Before it has a meaningful impact, I think it's 2027 because of the commercial activity that has to go along with the innovation.

[Brad Reback, Managing Director at Stifel]

Great, thank you very much.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Yep, you bet.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Ken Wong with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

[Ken Wong, Senior Analyst at Oppenheimer]

Fantastic. I wanted to maybe drill in a little bit on just the organic growth. Any way for you guys to help kind of splice what you might have seen from maybe the, like, same store sales versus maybe the net new organic that's coming onto the P&L? Hopefully, that question makes sense.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

We want to make sure we're framing or branching the right questions. Essentially, what's the cross-sell versus sort of net new mix? Is that your question?

[Ken Wong, Senior Analyst at Oppenheimer]

I guess what was coming from, let's say, the portfolio prior to, let's say, like a ProCare Transact versus the stuff that is now kind of flowing in as incremental organic. What was once inorganic coming in as organic? Does that make a little more sense?

[Jason Conley, EVP and CFO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, what's the impact of ProCare coming into organic? A little bit of accretion from ProCare, not as we talked about, not as much as we thought when we did the deal, but it's certainly accretive to the segment.

[Ken Wong, Senior Analyst at Oppenheimer]

Okay, got it. On the TEP business, I think going into the quarter, the expectations were high single digit in the back half. I guess, you know, only 6% in the quarter, low single in Q4. Was that isolated to any particular piece, or was it a little more broad-based? Is it just Neptune, or should we think about any other pieces that contributed to that slight weakness?

[Jason Conley, EVP and CFO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, it was Neptune predominantly. I mean, you had, it was an acute impact in Q3. We always had a little bit of a tougher setup in Q4, but even aside from that, it was definitely Deltek in both quarters.

[Ken Wong, Senior Analyst at Oppenheimer]

Okay, thank you very much.

[Jason Conley, EVP and CFO at Roper Technologies]

Neptune. Thank you.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Joshua Tilton with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.

[Joshua Tilton, SVP of Equity Research at Wolfe Research]

Hey guys, can you hear me?

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

You bet.

[Jason Conley, EVP and CFO at Roper Technologies]

Yep, good morning.

[Joshua Tilton, SVP of Equity Research at Wolfe Research]

Good morning, guys. I've been bouncing around on a few earnings this morning, so I apologize if it's already been asked. I guess the number one question for me is just, is there anything you can give us on the guidance front specifically for organic revenue growth that could increase our confidence that you'd, like, you de-risked it enough? Maybe you could just, like, walk us through a little bit further on, you know, where the de-risking is coming from Deltek versus Neptune and kind of what gives you the confidence that this is a good base to start for the rest of the year.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, I mean, I think we've given the outline by segment. I think Neil had framed it as we've got it at mid-single-digit growth. There could be a range there, and it really depends on Deltek's perpetual license activity. To a lesser extent, there's a couple of projects in our Transact business that might hit this quarter or next quarter. That's sort of the range there. I think we've given you that. Network's going to be sort of mid-single-digit plus. I think a lot of that's recurring revenue, and the only thing that can move around is truckers, right? They can come in and out of DAT on a monthly basis. We think we've got that sort of boxed. Then on low single digits for TEP, I think we've identified where the challenges are for Neptune's tariff activity. NDI works on mostly backlog for the quarter.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

The others are a little bit less backlog, but just based on the trends and the call-downs we had with the business, we feel like that's an appropriate number for the quarter.

[Joshua Tilton, SVP of Equity Research at Wolfe Research]

Really appreciate the color. Just maybe for a quick follow-up, I really appreciate all the color you guys gave on the AI positioning that you guys have and some of the examples. I guess what I'm trying to understand is it feels like every company that we talk to is trying to race to be a winner in this AI world, at a pace that we've kind of never seen before. Is there a dynamic, or do you feel that maybe you guys have this unique AI think tank going on inside of Roper because you have a group or a portfolio of companies that are all marching towards the same AI goal?

[Joshua Tilton, SVP of Equity Research at Wolfe Research]

If that's the case, maybe could you share with us how they're sharing knowledge and best practices and what they're seeing across some of the use cases that are already being successful to kind of set up the rest of the portfolio to be just as successful in their AI endeavor?

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, I appreciate that. I don't know if I would go as far as to say there's some think tank sitting in Sarasota that's crafting all this. What it is, is we have clarity of purpose, right? When you're vertical market system of record, and you're going to evolve to system of work, it's everybody. The portfolio construct is so similar that we're running basically the same play across the 20-plus software companies. There's common purpose and common understanding about that. There is a lot of information sharing. Every three weeks, there's an AI sort of showcase inside of Roper. We have a few hundred people talking about one company or two companies to highlight what they're doing internally or externally, architecture, commercial, whatever it may be.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

We send a weekly email about where the state of the technology is, the state of the evolution of AI to galvanize the leaders. There's telemetry we're putting into our planning process that we're looking for both product roadmaps and internal productivity. The group executives who, as you know, coach six or seven businesses each, those businesses are together all the time on all things related to business, AI being a big topic of it. I could see us, in the not-too-distant future, adding some resources at the corporate office, at the center that are an overlay to all of that, that are really scanning the horizon for the technology, the enabling technologies that are going and how to apply that technology. At the end of the day, this stuff is hard.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

I mean, it's what we're trying to do to identify tasks and work where you have to be deterministic and not probabilistic. It's hard to do. It's good that it's hard because when you do something that's hard, you create this magical moment for your customer, and that's where you can have this win-win relationship on value. We're super excited about all that. Again, have this high right to win because of all the context and data and decades of accumulated knowledge about how these verticals work. The final thing I would say is the real unlock for really anything inside Roper is our org structure, right? We're this highly decentralized, high-trust, autonomous structure. Taking an $8 billion P&L, it gets put into 29 units.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

You have super talented leadership teams that are highly motivated intrinsically and through our financial reward system to compete and win in a marketplace. This is the new frontier on how to do that.

[Joshua Tilton, SVP of Equity Research at Wolfe Research]

Sounds like a good setup for AI success. Thank you, guys. I appreciate the caller.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Thanks.

[Jason Conley, EVP and CFO at Roper Technologies]

Thanks.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Terry Tillman with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.

[Terry Tillman, Managing Director at Truist Securities]

Yeah, thanks, Neil, Jason, and Zach. Two questions. The first question is on software bookings and specifically with Deltek. The second one is going to be DAT. First, in terms of software bookings, I think you said high singles in 3Q. What are you assuming in 4Q? The second part of that first question is, and maybe this is wildly optimistic, but assuming at some point the government shutdown ceases, could you actually get those licenses in still in November or December, or are you just assuming that doesn't happen? I have that DAT follow-up.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Thanks for the question, Terry. I think for the fourth quarter, we'll see how it plays out. We had a very strong Q4 last year, so the comps are a little tougher, but I think it's the end of the year, and obviously, the pipelines look very strong across our businesses. You're right about Deltek. We're not assuming that's going to hit this year, but we've also seen customers make very quick decisions in the last few days, especially if they've got an internal budget dynamic that they can utilize. We're not assuming that at this point, but I will say, just for 2026, we do feel really good about what OBBB is going to mean for Deltek. Additionally, just Deltek's had the markets haven't been cooperative just in general for the last couple of years. The demand is definitely there. Deltek's done a lot to their cloud product.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

They're incorporating a lot of the new AI features that are going to be cloud-only. That should help drive some higher conversion. That's one of our, I think it's our biggest maintenance base at Roper. Excited about the future. Just need to get past this quarter of uncertainty.

[Terry Tillman, Managing Director at Truist Securities]

Got it. And then, Neil, on the slide 12, I like that slide. It shows kind of where you've delivered on the platform. I know with DAT, pricing and packaging was an important kind of growth unlock and improvement this year. Now you have this idea of one-click automation and then newer areas that seem like they've expanded the TAM around management and payments. Is there any way you can frame how much you can garner now per successful load or transaction going forward with some of this newer technology versus the past or the present as you laid out on that page? Thank you.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah. Appreciate it. You're right. The strategy at DAT, and I've called this out for a few quarters, if not longer, is we have this remarkable business that's a network between brokers and carriers, and we monetize both sides of the network on a subscription basis. We had then, what we have is the market captured, and we have very favorable go-to-market unit economics, especially on the carrier side because the carrier, you get your authority first, then you probably subscribe to DAT second, so you can understand where you're going to grab your load from. It's a very efficient go-to-market motion on capture there, very unique go-to-market motion relative to the unit economics. The strategy is how do you just scaffold more value on both sides of that network?

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

The ultimate value creation is the one you're talking about, which is how you sort of take the labor, the task labor out of the matching of a broker transaction. As we mentioned today, we broker about, you know, one, there's about 1.2 million loads a day on DAT. There's about $100 to $200 in task labor savings for each one of those. It's automated. You can apply whatever percentage you think is fair. I'm going to leave that open at the moment. We have a good indication internally, but some small percentage of the total loads and then some small percentage, a fair percentage of the labor task savings, and you'll get a very large sort of opportunity. Now that's the opportunity. Now we have to go equip it. You've got to make, we've got to integrate this capability into the TMS of every broker so it's native.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

You've got to onboard a large portion of the carrier base into this, which we're actively doing. We're super excited. The early results were like sold out on the broker front. The early results for integration is great, but there's a business we've got to go build here. The reason that we're unique in this is that we're truly Switzerland. We don't, we're not competing with the brokers. We're enabling the brokers, and it's a huge value savings for both the brokers and the carriers.

[Terry Tillman, Managing Director at Truist Securities]

Thanks. That's helpful.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

You bet.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Deane Gray with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

[Deane Dray, Managing Director at RBC Capital Markets]

Thank you. Good morning, everyone.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Good morning, Deane.

[Deane Dray, Managing Director at RBC Capital Markets]

Hey, just want to get a clarification on the timing delays at Neptune. You know, our experience has been, especially recently going through COVID, is once a utility is ready to place an order, they're unlikely to switch. It's already gone through their rate case. It's all a pilot study and so forth. Have they lost any of these orders, or is this strictly delay at this point?

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

No, no. Just to be super clear, this is pushed to the right. What we've done, and I alluded to this in the prepared remarks, is that we have this tariff coming through. Neptune decided, and we concurred fully, that they are going to assess a surcharge, which means you've got to essentially recontract or renegotiate with all the open orders about how to do that, and it just puts some gum into the system. It's a little bit easier when you're going through distribution to do that because you have a distribution partner you can sort of share some of this surcharge with, but when you're doing the direct business, that's a little bit more difficult to do and a little bit slower. This is 100% pushed to the right.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

In fact, Neptune reports there was a little market share gain in the quarter for Neptune, but these sort of market share quarter to quarter are sort of a point here, point there, half a point here, half a point there. The latest report is the share was actually improved a little bit with Neptune in the quarter.

[Deane Dray, Managing Director at RBC Capital Markets]

That's really helpful, and thanks for that clarification. A follow-up, I'll echo how much we appreciate that spotlight on DAT. Just the idea, you talked about the implications of making the investment in Convoy. You added that it's not profitable, but just the willingness to subsidize, make that investment so you have this end-to-end automation, just the implications of a bolt-on that's not profitable.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

I'll start. I'll ask Jason to add a little bit of color. In our case, it was a unique situation for us. It was very much a buy-versus-build. This is very complicated. It sounds very easy, but it is very complicated, complex algorithms to do this. They have to be absolutely deterministic. It's more ML than AI. There's a very large group of talented engineers that came with the acquisition. They're now part of the DAT sort of franchise. It's unique in that it's money-losing at the moment, but it's like the final piece to manifest the strategy of DAT. Because of what we talked about earlier, we have such high conviction on what's going to happen here.

[Jason Conley, EVP and CFO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, and I would just add that most of our strategies call for, you know, tuck-ins that are adjacent, and you sort of fold them in. It's like we just did Orchard for Clinisys. That's sort of the bread and butter that we would do for bolt-ons. This is really a technology acquisition that was, you know, it's really to create a new market. I would say that's very rare for us, but we think it's a great opportunity. We're willing to make that technology investment.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Excuse me.

[Deane Dray, Managing Director at RBC Capital Markets]

Thank you.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

You bet, Deane. Have a good day.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Dylan Becker with William Blair. Please go ahead.

[Faith Brunner, Equity Research Senior Associate at William Blair]

Hey guys, it's Faith on for Dylan. Maybe expanding on the DAT question, it seems like this end-to-end platform has been in the making for some time. Can you talk about where you see DAT growing as you continue to build out this network and the long-term potential there, and maybe even how this can drive durability despite some of the headwinds we're seeing in freight?

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, the DAT core business is a low double-digit growth business when you get the benefit of some unit growth versus just packaging and price. That's the long-term sort of organic growth rate of the core business. When you talk about this entire sort of tracking, automated business, we're talking about adding a capability that doesn't exist in the industry that is multiples of the existing TAM. We want to see actual momentum in there before we quote what the acceleration magnitude could be to DAT. It's exciting for sure. I know that's a little bit of a, not an answer you're looking for at the moment, but we want to actually see the growth on the field before we call how much accelerated growth rate there's going to be there.

[Faith Brunner, Equity Research Senior Associate at William Blair]

All right, no, that's helpful. Maybe just double-clicking on Deltek, can you maybe remind us what you guys saw during past government shutdowns and the impact to the business and any potential insulation there?

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, happy to do that. Just a reminder everybody, Deltek is 60% GovCon, 40% non-GovCon. We're talking about the 60% of Deltek that's in GovCon. What we've seen is when you have the government shutdown, it's the pending, it's the potential of the shutdown and the actual shutdown that just pauses commercial activity. The activity is still there. The pipelines continue to build. There's still discussions because everybody knows the shutdown will end, the government will be operational again, and we have this OB3 spending where we have to, all that will be awarded and has to be delivered. It's just in the height of the uncertainty, there's not a lot of signing on the purchase orders or the contracts.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

If this were, hypothetically, if this were happening in March, we would probably not be calling down the year because there'd be time left in the balance of the year for the commercial activity to sort of resolve itself. It's just we're sitting here in the last two or three months of the year, and we're going to run the clock out on the year and roll in the next year.

[Faith Brunner, Equity Research Senior Associate at William Blair]

All right, no, helpful. Thanks, guys.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

You bet.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Joe Giordano with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

[Joe Giordano, Managing Director at TD Cowen]

Hey guys, good morning.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Hey, good. It's good to hear from you, Joe.

[Joe Giordano, Managing Director at TD Cowen]

Yes, thanks. Just looking at app software, if we strip out the Deltek GovCon stuff for a second and just think about the acceleration of organic here, what's the catalyst for this? You look back, it's been small variance, but we're kind of like three years around 6%, give or take. What in your sense is really the catalyst to bring this into a high single to more of a high single framework?

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, it certainly will help when your largest business, the largest segment of your largest business, can sort of grow at its normalized growth rate. We're a couple of years into sort of a slowdown with the uncertainties across all the government spending. That helps quite a bit when you look at that. We've had, just going through the businesses, Vertafore is steady for us. A lot of AI opportunity in front of that business, probably takes, I mean, we'll see some early green shoots of that next year, but as we said earlier, probably more of 2027. Aderant has been just killing it. PowerPlan, doing a great job. CentralReach will turn organic, which will help. Frontline has been a little sluggish for the last couple of quarters, largely because of some uncertainty around the funding coming from what's happening at the Department of Education.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

You've got this hangover from all the COVID spending, and now that's getting more normalized. Frontline reaccelerating, which is in the offing in the next couple of years, will be super helpful to that regard. Finally, our Clinisys business for the U.S. part of our laboratory business, the legacy Sunquest, has just lagged for all the reasons that everybody knows for eight years, and now that's turning where that's a mid-single-digit organic growth enterprise for us now. That starts to help. We like what's happening here, in terms of the growth optionality and the growth capability.

[Joe Giordano, Managing Director at TD Cowen]

When you think about the buyback now and you think about the multiple of your stock, what's the thought process when you're weighing like, okay, here's a $1 billion opportunity here or $1 billion of deploying capital? It used to kind of be pretty straightforward with where the multiple of your stock was versus the multiple of what you're acquiring, and now it's kind of flipped a little bit. Maybe talk us through how much that's informing your decisions on where to allocate at a given moment in time.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

For us, it's never been about the multiple of our stock. It's been what's in the compounding math for a cash flow acceleration, what's the best deployment of capital to optimize the long-term cash flow compounding of the enterprise. We just have another lever and a buyback to put into that consideration set.

[Joe Giordano, Managing Director at TD Cowen]

Thanks, guys.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Julian Mitchell with Barclays. Please go ahead.

[Julian Mitchell, Managing Director at Barclays]

Hi, good morning. I just wanted to start off with the outlook for TEP and Neptune in particular on the top line. You've had the backlog declining there for sort of two plus years. The revenue growth is slowing a little bit. I just wondered what's the confidence that that organic growth on revenue doesn't continue slowing into next year, just given those backlog dynamics. Thank you.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

I think we got to, so let's just be clear about the backlog dynamic. This is about the buildup from the COVID period. Pre-COVID, you might have a couple quarters of visibility to an order backlog. It wasn't quite a book and ship business, but much more book and ship than it was when you ran up through COVID. All the customers gave us blanket orders that were a year plus out. Now, when I spoke earlier, we're normalizing the order lead times slowly over time. The backlog grew and it's bleeding down based on this order timing dynamic. Set that apart from the demand environment, the market share environment. That's point one.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

Point two on the more normalizing piece at Neptune on the demand environment is, we're just in a cycle now this year, probably next year, where we're just in normalized growth for that business where the prior two or three years were accelerated growth because of the hangover from the COVID period.

[Julian Mitchell, Managing Director at Barclays]

That's very helpful. Thank you. My second one might be around sort of with all this effort around sort of AI, just wondered what the implication for that might be on your, let's say, core R&D. Is that, could that be a bigger headwind to core margin expansion in future? Whether there's been any view to sort of looking to acquire more AI-intensive businesses within your overall capital deployment framework. Thank you.

[Jason Conley, EVP and CFO at Roper Technologies]

Yeah, so I actually, this is Jason. I think it's interesting. We're getting quite a bit of productivity using some of the frontier models out there, Cloud Code, Codex, Cursor. We're not really seeing, now obviously, we're going through our planning this year, but it's creating a lot of opportunity to just do more with less. That's our posture, that our R&D envelope will probably stay the same and we'll just get more out of it. When it comes to acquisitions, look, we'll look for small tuck-ins that we can do. We just did a really small one for Aderant. That's not necessarily buying AI talent, but it's providing an AI solution that gets us faster to market. We'll do those occasionally, I think. It's not going to be our primary way to get after AI faster, but certainly will be an option.

[Julian Mitchell, Managing Director at Barclays]

Great. Thank you.

[Neil Hunn, President and CEO at Roper Technologies]

You bet. Have a good day.

[Operator]

This concludes our question and answer session. We will now return back to Zach Moxcey for closing remarks.

[Zach Moxcey, VP of Investor Relations at Roper Technologies]

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with you during our next earnings call.

[Operator]

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Participants

Executives

• Jason Conley, EVP and CFO
• Zach Moxcey, VP of Investor Relations
• Neil Hunn, President and CEO

Analysts

• George Kurosawa, Equity Research Analyst at Citi
• Brad Reback, Managing Director at Stifel
• Joshua Tilton, SVP of Equity Research at Wolfe Research
• Terry Tillman, Managing Director at Truist Securities
• Julian Mitchell, Managing Director at Barclays
• Faith Brunner, Equity Research Senior Associate at William Blair
• Joe Giordano, Managing Director at TD Cowen
• Brent Thill, Research Analyst at Jefferies
• Ken Wong, Senior Analyst at Oppenheimer
• Deane Dray, Managing Director at RBC Capital Markets