Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Richard Davis - Needham.
Richard Davis - Needham & Company
Question is, what new modules or upgrades have you added to aspenONE over the past year and can you talk about what you are doing over the next year at least at a high level because it will be useful to hear that.
Mark Fusco
Over the past year or so, we have been continuing and have spent a lot of our money on continuing the integration of all the different point products that we have and pulling them into an integrated suite. We have got several new releases of software that are coming out for both the engineering and the manufacturing and supply chain solutions over the next six months or so. They come out with substantial new functionality, and ability to be installed virtually and a new, integrated way and look and feel from a business process perspective in the way the customers use the software. So we have really made the transition over the past several years from an idea about what aspenONE is, to the reality of delivering it, and making it better over a period of time. Over the next six months or so, when we owe all of our customers and the public a look at the new aspenONE software, which will be coming out and we will do that shortly.
Richard Davis - Needham & Company
And then this is maybe a more philosophical question, maybe harder, so if you are doing these term licenses and you are creating long-term receivables, fundamentally, isn't that a loan to your buyers in the sense that you are stretching out payments or a discount one way or another? And I know it does create future predictability, but it would also, I think, increase DSO. So talk to us why you need to do the business model that way. Or is that just something that you have just been doing it so long, it makes the most sense or how do you think of the pluses and minuses of different models in terms of the selling.
Brad Miller
The main difference you see in the company today, as compared to say a year or more ago. Is that the company has always had a business model of selling term-based licenses to our customers, and often our customers select to pay either up front or over time and the more common would be over time. The main difference that you see in the company today is that we have elected to retain those cash flows in the future for ourselves, rather than factoring the receivables to banks as we have been doing over the past several years.
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