Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions)
Carl Bass
While the operator is polling for questions, I will inform you of our upcoming investor events. We will be attending the Morgan Stanley Tech Conference in San Francisco on March 2 and the Jefferies Technology Summit in Chicago on March 10. Additionally, we will be hosting our Annual Investor Day on April 2. This year's event will be at our gallery in San Francisco. We plan it to be an informative day and we hope you'll be able to join us. And with that, I’ll turn it back over to the operator.
Operator
Our first question comes from the line of Greg Dunham with Deutsche Bank. You may proceed.
Greg Dunham – Deutsche Bank
Hi, yes. Thank you. I guess the first question is when you look at the guidance that you have provided for Q1, are you expecting the same kind of linearity throughout the quarter looking to Q1 as you have experienced in Q4?
Carl Bass
No. I think roughly speaking I would say yes. The only kind of caveat I give is we have now seen a couple of quarter where external events have kind of nominated what happened. I don't think any of us expected to be sitting here with Lehman Brothers out of business or any of the other failures in the banking system. And so I'm unprepared to speculate on any of those things and how they might impact it. If you exempt those from consideration, I think linearity will be more or less the same.
Sue Pirri
Q1 does have a slightly different linearity than the rest of the year because of the product launches. In fact, that would, as Carl said, exempting other external factors would likely mimic previous years.
Greg Dunham – Deutsche Bank
Okay. And then one quick follow-up, the deferred maintenance, that was actually up 9%, I know that had some contribution from acquisitions, but was that better than I guess the overall revenue growth? I think you mentioned the deferred billings were less than affected, but that seems a little more stable than I would have imagined?
Sue Pirri
Greg, the one thing about maintenance is that customers see the value in the program and we will continue to renew those contracts provided they have people in those seats. Now, we have continued to think that our maintenance revenue will grow well and that we will see good-bookings on that as long as there are people in those seats. So the job loss has affected that and I don't think it was tremendously different than we expected.
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