PREMIERE GLOBAL SERVICES, INCORPORATED
Moderator: Sean O’Brien
04-19-07/4:00 p.m. CT
Confirmation # 8787467
Page 33
PREMIERE GLOBAL SERVICES, INCORPORATED
Moderator: Sean O’Brien
April 19, 2007
4:00 p.m. CT
Operator: Good day everyone and welcome to the Premiere Global Services, Incorporated first quarter 2007 conference call. Today’s call is being recorded.
This call is also being simultaneously broadcast over the Internet. You can go to our Web site at www.premiereglobal.com and go to our “Press” section.
Alternatively, you may listen to the rebroadcast from your telephone beginning at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time today through midnight, Friday, April 27th. The replay numbers are 1-888-203-1112. That’s 1-888-203-1112 within the United States and Canada or at 1-719-457-0820. That’s 1-719-457-0820 outside of North America. The confirmation code to access the replay is 8787467. Again, that’s 8787467.
All lines will be muted throughout the presentation until the question-and-answer period begins. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to the Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning and Investor Relations for Premiere Global Services, Mr. Sean O’Brien. Mr. O’Brien, please go ahead, sir.
Sean O’Brien: Thank you and good afternoon, everyone.
If you’ve not received a copy of our first quarter earnings release, please visit our Web site at PGiConnect.com, where it is available in our Investor Relations section.
Joining me on the call this afternoon are Boland Jones, our Chairman and CEO, Ted Schrafft, President of Premiere Global and Mike Havener, our CFO.
Following some brief comments by management, we will open the call to your questions.
Before I turn it over to Boland, I would like to remind everyone that statements made in this conference call, other than those concerning historical information, should be considered forward-looking and subject to various risks and uncertainties. Such forward-looking statements are based on management’s beliefs as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to management pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
Our actual results may differ materially from the results anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of a variety of factors, including those we identified in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2006, and our other filings with the SEC.
In addition during, this call we will present non-GAAP financial measures of our business. Please consult both our press release and Form 8-K filing of this afternoon for a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measures. These materials are also available at our Web site at PGiConnect.com.
At this point, I’ll turn the call over to Boland.
Boland Jones: Thanks, Sean and good afternoon everyone. This is Boland Jones, Chairman and CEO of Premiere Global Services and welcome to our first quarter earnings call for the year 2007.
I’m so proud of our company, where we are and where we’re going. The solid first quarter performance we reported earlier and building on the moment from our fourth quarter last year. It’s a direct result of the many, many steps that we’ve taken over the last several years to put this company in the position it is today.
I don’t want to forget ever to thank each and every associate that works at this company tirelessly to make this dream possible and make this vision possible. So, a special thanks to those people. And I also want to thank our customers as well as the shareholders.
Before I get into the nitty-gritty, though, I want to talk about PGi and the vision for the company. Premiere Global’s focus, put simply is to improve business processes for companies of all sizes and in all geographies. Inside this large and growing space, we play in the specific area that we have labeled constituent relationship management.
Over the years, we have assembled what we believe is the broadest array of communication technologies in the industry. And we’ve put them together into an extremely powerful enterprise class ecosystem called the Premiere Global Communication Operating System.
Every day companies of all sizes are using the first of its kind on-demand communications operating system. Just like they are using Google as an Internet operating system or PayPal as a financial operating system or even Microsoft as a desktop operating system, our goal is to be referenced by our customers and our users as the communication operating system.
Specifically, our customers utilize our Communication Operating System to automate, simplify and improve critical daily business processes that they hold critical to their business. What we’ve done is create communication technologies and made some of those business processes that are most critical and most important to each of these businesses communication-centric with our technologies and our operating system.
I’m talking about critical and universal business processes, like product innovation, for instance, sales improvement, product development, management in HR regards or management in all regards, customer service, and employee relations.
As you can hear from the list I just read off, these are critical and pertinent business processes for each and every enterprise, small or large, each and every day. No matter who you ask in the enterprise, these are the critical processes.
And what we’ve done is create communication-centric process improvement technology. And we’ve used our communication technology talent to bid us into this big and important game in the universe of industries.
What I’m specifically referencing and talking about is using our Communication Operating System for each and every business in their business processes that involve all constituents that are critical to that enterprise’s success.
A lot of times people talk about CRM systems. The very name and nature of CRM, Customer Relationship Management, constitutes a certain meaning to me and hopefully it does to you, too. That’s the purpose of the acronym. But CRM forgets very important constituents, in our humble opinion, with each and every enterprise that our customers are concerned with every day. It constitutes that customers are the need that the company has for relationship management.
And while that’s true, there’s also the need to manage and communicate and relationship manage the employee, the vendor, the research people in that industry, the trade groups, the stakeholders of various types, shareholders, board members, past employees, past customers, future customers. That’s why we consider CRM constituent relationship management.
And quite frankly, we’re surprised that we’re the first ones to actually discover this phenomenon, but we’re excited about it. And we’re excited about claiming this category as our category, customers, companies, enterprises that actually utilize our Communication Operating Systems as needed in on-demand mode. They enjoy avoiding the large capital expense, the technology risk, the implementation, and the management headaches associated with buying and installing the hardware, software, and other necessary components themselves, once again rationalizing why we’re in a great space in the on-demand space for all the outsource reasons, but why we’re in such a great space with our communication technology sitting on that on-demand platform.
The reason we’ve created this Communications Operating System and the reason we offer it in on-demand is very simple. It’s what our customers are asking for. Our customers want solutions on-demand. Our customers want strategic partners with broad solution suites. Our customers want on-demand systems with open architecture, with APIs that are compliant to every ERP system.
Our global customers especially want ERP system compliance so that they can regulate turning on and off services for old and new employees, for regulating the administration of those items so that they comply and that there’s some important data and information that’s private to their company stays that way. And our customers want fewer vendors rather than more vendors, more importantly.
Now, when I speak to investors and to our analysts and those the likes on this phone call, I know you all’s perception of PGi is still that of a hybrid. Boland, it’s a great conferencing company and I know you have some other stuff. And that’s fine. But I’m committed to making it clear to you if not today, then very soon, that this is not how our customers view us and it’s not how we view ourselves either.
We’re reaching for something much larger. I see us becoming an indispensable asset for companies around the world as we help them grow their business and improve their efficiency and profitability and enhance their customer experience with our on-demand communication technologies in different applications.
In the process, we believe we are defining and leading the exciting constituent relationship management category. I’m telling you our customers see the value of what I’m talking about.
Our new Web site, PGiConnect, will help extend that vision. And what you see today in that Web presence will not be the same presence that you see six months from now or even three months from now as we continue to improve that to further this vision, not only to our customers but to every constituent that touches this company and comes in contact with it.
And I believe because of these things and these efforts and the efforts of every associate in this company and the customers contributing to our success I believe it is contributing to the momentum – the great momentum – you’re seeing in our business today.
Now, let’s get into the nitty-gritty. In the past 24 hours, there has been a heck of a lot of news about our company. And let me detail some of that now, first, most importantly our quarterly results. And again, those results we’re very proud of, but they’re results of a long, hard amount of work, not just in this last quarter that we’re very proud of; two, the launch of PGiConnect.com, which I mentioned; three, the appointment of an incredible board member addition, Steven Jones, to our Board of Directors; four, our tender offer for a significant portion of the shares of this company and finally, the settlement with a firm called Crescendo Partners that was announced earlier this afternoon.
I will turn the call over to Ted Schrafft shortly to discuss our solid first quarter results in great detail. But before I do that, let me take a moment to talk to you about what the other items I just listed mean to our company.
Yesterday, we announced the formal launch of our new Web portal, PGiConnect.com. I’ve spoken to a lot of you and to a lot of our customers and to other constituents about the importance of this powerful tool for some time now. But let me take a moment to reiterate its many benefits for those new to the PGI story.
First, we believe that this single point of presence on the Web will drive greater frequency of use of our existing applications, increase lead generation and increase our cross selling opportunities by exposing our enterprise customers to our entire suite of solutions. This exposure and tangibility is so important for our company today. It’s very exciting for us to be able to launch this site.
Second, we believe PGiConnect.com will be an important new tool for us sales associates to demonstrate the breadth of our capabilities to our existing and prospective customers as well as a great training tool for our own associates worldwide.
And third, by creating an online community where developers, partners and customers can share their best practices, we hope to foster for the first time additional development and more composite and third party applications for solutions like ours based on communication technologies that will greatly improve business processes.
And fourth, we believe that empowering customers with new self service tools will greatly enhance their experience.
And finally, we believe enabling more of our enterprise customers to self administer their accounts on the Web will drive additional efficiencies throughout our entire business.
Put simply, bringing our Communication Operating System on line with PGiConnect.com will greatly further our goals of increasing our solutions-based revenue growth and improving our profitability. The new PGiConnect.com portal is a major milestone for our company.
And I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone that was involved in making it a reality. From the developers in Tennessee to each of the people throughout this company that contributed to it in sales and in marketing as well as the people here in Atlanta and the people worldwide. We are so excited to bring this new capability to our enterprise customers and we are committed to improving it each and every day.
Next as detailed in our earnings release, we’re very pleased to welcome Steven Jones, the Dean of the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to our Board of Directors. Steve brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to our company.
As a previous CEO, McKinzie consultant and current director of prestigious companies like Bank of America, Steve has a lot of experience in growing companies and sharpening strategies to take advantage of opportunities in the marketplace. And we know that he will make a meaningful contribution to our future success.
In a separate release this afternoon, we announced $150 million self tender offer. As detailed in the release, we are offering to acquire up to nearly 11.9 million shares of our common stock or approximately 17 percent of our total shares outstanding. The offer price for $12.65 in cash represents a premium of approximately 10 percent to the average closing price of our stock over the past 10 trading days.