Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions). Our first question comes from Toni Sacconaghi, Sanford Bernstein. You may ask your question.
Toni Sacconaghi – Sanford Bernstein
Yes, thank you and good morning. It sounds like you have a relatively pessimistic forecast for IT spending and one that cost that cost for further deceleration in 2009 to help us understand, sort of how you see things on a dynamic level. Can you give us a sense of what you thought IT spending was in Q4 of '08 given that it sounds like you calling for it to be down about minus 10% in the first half of '09? And can you help us to understand where your backlog going into Q1 compares versus usual year, typical years, I think typically you have about $100 million or little more entering Q1, can you comment on that as well?
Joe Tucci
Yes, I'll start and may be David could try many your, Toni, this is Joe. I haven't really given any real thought to what spending was in 2008 believe or not we spend a lot of time looking forward. As I said, read a lot of surveys that the industry has done and as I said, I talked to hundreds and hundreds of customers in groups and individually and most customers are telling us at least for the first half of this year, they are going to be very cautious and are expecting declines and it’s not, and that's what we are hearing.
I do not really think even though we gave our best guess, I do not really think what we are seeing for the year has a tremendous amount of merit because it's just not that kind of visibility. But I do think what we are saying has a lot of merit for the next four to six months.
And I am convinced Toni, that we're going to see, in that mid to high digit decline in overall IT spending and I said, I do believe that where the products that we have to kind of like to like so where IT spending real happen and we'll fair better than most. Based on yearly results for Q4 it looks like that’s exactly what happened if the reports that I have seen we did fair better than most. And like hope we expect that to continue. But there's definitely going to see a deterioration of what we saw -- we started to see this kind of storm really taking some foothold in Q4. And I think it will be a harder storm in Q1 and Q2. I just believe that, that’s why I said.
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