Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from George Sutton – Craig-Hallum Capital.
George Sutton – Craig-Hallum Capital
So last quarter, Ted, and I think in a couple of the previous quarterly calls, you have suggested a negative free to a positive free GDP is the ideal environment for you, and I'm not a GDP tracker, but I think we're about there. And I was just wondering, wouldn't this be the ideal time for the relevance of your offering as you're out pitching this offering?
Ted A. Fernandez
We do. We do believe that when productivity is important to clients, which I believe it's within that spectrum you mentioned of kind of broad economic performance, that our services should be in the highest demand. And we would expect that to happen.
Clearly you are dealing with clients in essence getting a little bit further away from what I'll call the economic crash of the latter part of 2008, so we know that clients are sensitive to any level of discretionary spend. But we also know that it is critical for clients to sustain all the productivity improvements they've put in place, and when I tell you that some of them have done it through brute force, I'm not exaggerating. We know, because we speak to many of these clients, that they will have to come back and make structural change to retain some of those productivity improvements. And we believe they will benefit us.
So as things continue to get further away from what I call the economic crash, I would expect the overall demand for our offerings to improve.
George Sutton – Craig-Hallum Capital
Could you give a little more detail in terms of where some of these cost cuts have been made and then the counter-thought process with respect to hiring more advisory sales people in Q3.
Ted A. Fernandez
Well, it's been across the board. I think it really doesn't matter by industry, clients have really taken a very hard look at their entire operating platforms, and I'm talking soup-to-nuts, and looked at any way to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of their platforms.
Having said that, we know that many did this very quickly and they didn't do it as thoughtfully as they would have liked but that's what was demanded by the market. And they know that if they want to try to sustain those productivity gains, they're going to have to do more work. And I believe that in order to do, they will have to turn to outsiders for that level of assistance.
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