Conference Call Excerpt #2
Rick Sherland, Goldman Sachs
A couple of questions. First, Ron, on license revenue growth, I'm wondering if you're, at this point in the quarter, able to comment at all on, maybe looking for 60% or so overall revenue growth for the quarter, or any comment on the split between licenses and services.
Ron Codd
Rick, as you know, in the past we've gotten into a practice of not getting into providing line-item specific guidance in the revenue area, and we continue to prefer to stay away from that. As I've mentioned in the past, it's everything we can do to manage the total number of different expectation points we do set and I think that we're very forthcoming with providing guidance to the investor community, much more so, frankly, than most companies are. But when it gets into having to deal with a lot of detailed expectations, that's more than I care to get involved in trying to manage. And I am very concerned that any expectations we set, we have the ability, capability, and focus on meeting. What we've said about license revenue growth is that we expect we will be able to continue to grow at or above the rate of the general ERP market growth rate. And then, we would continue to reiterate that guidance.
Rick Sherland
OK, and how is business coming in this quarter in terms of the skewing of the business, and what are the implications for DSO's?
Ron Codd
The report from the field is that we're in a business-as-usual situation for the quarter. Nothing unusual to report. And so that's where we're at there.
Rick Sherland
Ok, and back to an earlier question about the mid-market. I didn't hear any metrics on how you're doing there. Can you offer something in terms of percentage of business, or number of employees that are focused and dedicated to this area?
Ron Codd
Yeah, it continues to be a relatively small portion of our overall business. I think that we have maybe somewhere around 100 or so people involved in the middle market business activity at this point. We haven't broken out, nor do we intend to break out, any specific revenue items or disclosures. But I will say that they've been growing at a very healthy clip with a roughly doubling of the unit sales that they've been doing each quarter over the last several quarters.
Rick Sherland
OK, and lastly, regarding general headcount issues, are you still adding people at the rate that you have been? There seem to be some bears on the street that, you know, sometimes you hear some crazy stories that you're cutting back on expenses, maybe even laying some people off. Can you refute that?
Ron Codd
Sure, I can refute that very clearly. We are, other than exercising normal fiscal responsibility, which I would hope everybody out there is interested in us doing, we're managing our business as usual. This quarter we will add approximately 700 or so people, we believe, to our workforce, which is a substantial increment and quite in line with the increments in the last couple of quarters. Any other perspectives on our fiscal situation are (chuckling) probably greatly exaggerated.
Rick Sherland
OK. Thank you. |
