Question-and-Answer Session
[Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from the line of [Ariel Schochet]. Your line is open.
Michael Nemeroff
Hi. It’s actually Michael Nemeroff. Thanks guys for taking my questions. Just one for Mark. Obviously it’s a tough environment and I can appreciate the no guidance right now. But can you just give us a sense of how much worse do you think the environment could get and is it possible that you will not be able to grow revenues from continuing operations in 2009?
Mark Greene
Well, anything is possible at this point. I guess I would admit to limited disability. I do have two answers for you. With respect to the scoring business, I’ll point you back to my comments, I said, the recent evidence suggest that that is stabilizing at the rate that we saw exiting the quarter, which will mean of course when you do the year-on-year math that there’ll still be some decline, but we don’t see the going forward rate of scoring continuing to fall as it had in late September. So we see signs of stability there. That’s encouraging. We keep monitoring that on a daily basis.
With respect to software license sales, I guess what I would say is the pipeline continues to look good as it did last quarter, but the lesson we took away from last quarter was a fair number of deals that looked good to go, which we had authority and approval, got pulled by the customer as they moved to cash conservation. And we are still talking to clients to understand whether those discipline to remain in effect or whether they are been relaxed. So I’d say there is latent demand for our products. What we have to do is satisfy ourselves that we can convert that into actual business.
Michael Nemeroff
Okay. And then also, so far you’ve identified approximately 100 million in cost. Just wondering how much more you could potentially cut if, for example, the environment doesn’t improve as you are expecting it to in the back half of ’09?
Mark Greene
In my remarks at the end where I talked about some additional trimming of staff, salary fees, hiring fees, et cetera, we are targeting in the range of 5% of our operating expense. That’s on top of the previously worked out 15% or so of our cost base. So you should take the 15% that we did earlier in this year and tack on roughly 5% that we are doing as we speak.
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