Aspen Tech last week (finally) announced results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended June 30, 2010. If you recall, AspenTech is in the middle of a painful transition, moving customers from a traditional perpetual license model to subscriptions and taking serious revenue hits to do so. The company feels that pain will be worth it, as the AspenTech that emerges have stronger ties to its customers and greater financial stability. But the interim is tough, as these results show:

• Q4 total revenue was $38.2 million, down from $71.3 million in Q4 2009, due primarily to the transition to the new aspenONE licensing model.

• Subscription revenue was $5.9 million in Q4, up from $4.0 million in Q3. (No year/year comparables are possible since the company’s new aspenONE licensing model was launched in Q1 of fiscal 2010.)

• Software revenue (or term-based contracts for certain products and perpetual licenses) was $8.1 million in Q4, compared to $41.6 million a year ago.

• Services and maintenance was $24.2 million in Q4, down from $29.6 million last year.

• All of this led to a loss from operations of $35.6 million and a net loss of $34.0 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010.

Even so, AspenTech did have some good news to share:

• Product-related bookings were $138 million for Q4, a record for the company, leading to record full-year bookings of $366 million. To give you some idea of how important AspenTech’s products are to its customers, one customer alone accounted for $30 million of this booking in Q4.

• AspenTech says that the value of “contractually committed, future cash collections associated with the company’s subscription and multi-year term contracts” was $625 million at the end of the fourth quarter, up from $537 million at the end of Q3 and up from $466 million at the end of fiscal 2009. I think this is a way of defining the total value of the contracts — which may be recognized over 10 years or 2 years — as a measure of customer commitment to AspenTech.

• The company closed 20 product-related bookings of over $1 million during Q4, and 50 bookings between $250,000 and $1 million. In Q3, for comparison, AspenTech closed 21 bookings of over $1 million and 39 of between $250,000 and $1 million. Momentum appears to be building.

• Average deal size for product related bookings over $100,000 was $1.1 million in the fourth quarter, up from $807,000 in Q3.

CEO Mark Fusco said that customers moving to the new aspenONE licensing model combined with new and expanded usage “were well above our expectations … we are optimistic that AspenTech is well positioned to continue growing its over a billion dollar total contract value in fiscal 2011 and beyond.” Mr. Fusco said that product bookings were about $100 million higher than expected for the year.

Mr. Fusco gave a bit of detail on where this interest is generated: the energy sector accounted for 34% of bookings in the year; chemicals, 32%; engineering and construction, 28% of bookings. The slant towards engineering (75% of product-related bookings in 2010, up from the traditional 66% or so) is due to timing of renewals — not to any specific product, sales or geographic issue.

In February AspenTech guided to fiscal 2010 GAAP revenue of $165 million, with an operating loss of $100 million. It came close: total revenue for the year was $166.3 million, with an operating loss of $109 million.

This transition will take time to complete, since AspenTech’s customers will be signing up under the new model as their existing maintenance contracts come up for renewal — the company talked about a 4 to 5 year transition period on the Q4 earnings call. For 2011, AspenTech guided to total revenue $180 million to $190 million, leading to an operating loss of $70 million to $80 million.