Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Adam Holt - Morgan Stanley
Adam Holt - Morgan Stanley
Understanding that your fourth quarter had some unique attributes, did you see any signals in the quarter that would suggest that you saw stability in either any end markets or any particular verticals and maybe talk a little bit about what the assumptions are underpinning the guide for the Q1 with respect to any kind of improvement and then I guess more longer-term as we think about a recovery scenario, where would you expect to see the first signs of reacceleration across your product lines.
Charles Phillips
The verticals for Q4 has strong double-digit growth so that’s been helping us obviously getting new design wins in vertical applications and then the drag factor, when we get that win we often get some of the ERP, usually [PRAM] and certainly we get the tech stack underneath that. So that’s been an important differentiator for us that SAP simply doesn’t have.
And the few areas where they try to go in the verticals like banking as I described, it didn’t quite work out and we have their partners coming to us now.
Safra Catz
In regard to the guidance I’ll have to tell you that our pipelines continue to grow really very well. I think that what we definitely saw that our customers are realizing that business does have to continue and go forward. Now as you know, we ourselves have so much sort of company specific momentum that we’ve been able to push through the economic situation rather well and I have to tell you that I still see the pipelines growing rather significantly.
And so in this case I used really unusually conservative, very conservative close rates for Q1 to just keep a level of conservatism in our fiscal Q1. It is Q1, it is always a tricky quarter and we have a very different comparison as to Q1 of last year. So that’s what we used underpinning for the guidance.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Sarah Friar - Goldman Sachs
Sarah Friar - Goldman Sachs
On the margins, you set yourself that target way back when of 50% tight margins and clearly this quarter you tipped over even that high bar, as you look forward into next fiscal year is there still an ability to see margin expansion from here or as the economy hopefully begins to recover is there any reason to say that you’d start to reinvest a little in the business and maybe stop some of this big march forward on the operating margin side.
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