Question-and-Answer Session
[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of Joseph Vafi of Jefferies & Company.
Joseph Vafi - Jefferies & Co.
Great results here this afternoon.
Francisco D'Souza - President and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Joe.
Joseph Vafi - Jefferies & Co.
[inaudible] circle back to the guidance here real quick for '08 as we kind of look at the visibility for the year versus other years and obviously the guidance here for '08 is pretty important relative to where people are looking at the stock right now, if you could kind of comment on the year along visibility, that's one thing? And then secondly at your user event this year, your client event, I know Francisco commented about a lot of customers have their budget in place. But, maybe any commentary at a macro level at least on how they're viewing Cognizant in '08 and if they're going to be spending more with Cognizant that would be great.
Francisco D'Souza - President and Chief Executive Officer
Sure. Joe, I'll say a couple of things. On the... on the outlook for '08. The outlook that we provided today is based on a number of factors. Detailed conversations with our clients has been out in about? the management team has been out with clients for the last month and a half having detailed conversations. We've done a thorough review of our pipeline, we've done our own assessment of the macroeconomic environment and factored that into our thinking as we've provided you with our outlook for 2008. And all of that of course is supported by the usual process we go through coming into any year which is a very granular level, bottoms up forecast from our field on what we think we can do with each of our clients in the upcoming years. So, we feel very confident that we can achieve our outlook for 2008 that we've provided with you? to you today.
Gordon Coburn - Chief Financial and Operating Officer
And let me just add one more thing there, that's probably important. The base line full year revenue guidance that we’ve provided today includes assumptions at some client specific unexpected issues will arise due to the economy. So, we've got it? we've given assumes not everything is going to go perfect.
Francisco D'Souza - President and Chief Executive Officer
And then the... you know the other part of your question was around as... client budget. As we said, we did a couple of things to get a little bit more clarity around this issue. The first is that, about two weeks ago, when we did our Global Field Kick-Off Meeting, our Sales Kick-Off Meeting we pulled or the client partners who represent the top 50 accounts at Cognizant and we asked them about the status of client budgets, have the budgets being finalized, are they locked down at this point? And over 80% of the clients essentially represented by these client partners budget were locked down. So that points to minimum ambiguity in spending plans going in to 2008 and that's very consistent with what we would've expected and we've seen at this point in the year in prior years. And then of course, we expect and have already started to see that offshoring has become more of a lever that clients are pulling to achieve their goals as they go into 2008, as budgets are flat to modestly up, offshoring becomes a great way to do more with a smaller or same set of dollars.
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