Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator's instruction) Your first question comes from Ittai Kidron - Oppenheimer & Co.
Ittai Kidron - Oppenheimer & Co.
John, can you give us a little bit more color on Europe, specifically, what you are seeing out there? First of all, what would be the typical customer that you have in yours? Was that typically a smaller relative to or average bigger and is there any geographical color within Europe that you can give us some strength that we can assume over there?
John McAdam
Yes, absolutely. First of all, from a customer profile, our customer profiles are actually very exciting in Europe. I mean whether you are in the UK, Germany, France, Scandinavia, actually in the Middle East and Africa, we are seeing large fortune or [3.10] 200 type customer so we are very, very confident in there. And we obviously had a misstep last quarter but we had a great year. We have actually spent a lot of time since we did the preannouncement, face to face meetings with sales management, not just conference calls and we think we have got pretty good handle in the business. If you dissect Europe and you look at this coming quarter, we feel very good about our opportunities in the Middle East and Africa.
We feel very good in Southern Europe. We feel very good in Germany and Eastern Europe and we expect the UK to see some rebound as well. So, overall we feel pretty good about it.
Ittai Kidron - Oppenheimer & Co.
Okay, so this was just two weeks of? you are cutting a headline here and??
John McAdam
No, we expect the economy continue to be tough but what we have done we hope and we spent a lot of time in this because I think we have taken up pretty conservative approach. I think the conservative approach has come in terms of both to mark some sales and then we will take in that at the management level.
Ittai Kidron - Oppenheimer & Co.
Very good and second question is more of a strategic one with regards to your hiring plans for the year. Can you give us some color around that and some would argue that in challenge times like this. You might look into more strategic opportunities to displace your competition even more and be willing to make steps that otherwise in an ongoing business might not be the best to do right now but as far as continuing to invest in your business and doing it in a way that in this timeframe could put you in a much better position when exiting the market something for example there has been talked about Cisco doing that a lot and do you see opportunities like that or do you think that at this point, given the fact that the market is more of a duopoly or just kind of seeing the business and you are going to scale it to how worth that the money is going to come?
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
