Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator instructions) Our first question comes from Jay Vleeschhouwer with Merrill Lynch. Sir you may ask your question.
Jay Vleeschhouwer – Merrill Lynch
Thanks, good morning. Dick a few things, first looking into fiscal ’09 what are your expectations for being able to maintain new maintenance and maintenance renewals, signings, are you seeing any indications at all that customers are scaling back on renewals, maintaining the license space but perhaps not paying maintenance on as many seats as before.
Dick Harrison
Jay we haven’t seen any deterioration in the maintenance. In fact, I think we had in the script. We have a record number, historical record number of users that pay maintenance for our software in the range of 900,000 active users on a daily basis and the number is going up, not down. So there is no deterioration in the maintenance numbers.
Jay Vleeschhouwer – Merrill Lynch
Secondly, looking at the market, could you talk a little bit more about the various markets auto, aero, high tech, other industrial markets, any important indications in any of those and with respect to one of the major objectives you delineate in the prepared remarks for ’09 meaning the investments in the channel and channel capacity, could you talk about that? What are the objectives for growing capacity and are you seeing any improvements in channel economics? Is it increasingly valuable to a reseller to do business with you versus let us say (inaudible) or anyone else. Is their margin structure becoming better by doing business with you?
Dick Harrison
Well, with respect to the verticals, again, we didn’t really see any softness in the September quarter. You know, we had a record quarter with over $300 million in revenue. It was the high end of the guidance both on earnings as well as revenue. So, we didn’t see any softness. At the same time, with the exchange rate and just watching what is happening we are opening up the new year, fiscal year, here with a sort of a cautious attitude. With respect to verticals, we didn’t see any sort of, you know, softness in any particular vertical. I mentioned that on the heels on the EADS win, we really do have some big active campaigns. A number of them are displacements of our competitors and it crosses multiple verticals. So, we are not really seeing as much of that.
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