Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Daniel Ives – FBR Capital Markets.
Daniel Ives – FBR Capital Markets
A few questions, first would you say the amount of hosted business this quarter was more than you were expecting going in to the quarter or about the same?
Paul A. Ricci
Well, in our hosted business now it’s of sufficient scale and volume that we’re able to make reasonable predictions quarter-to-quarter and I think there was a slight positive variance in the business perhaps but reasonably consistent with what we expected.
Daniel Ives – FBR Capital Markets
Then can you just talk about just overall op margins and I know you’re not giving guidance for next year but where you see those kind of trending over the next few quarters? Then, just lastly, once you address that are you going to start to give a bookings number? Is that something you’ve thought about just giving the amount of hosted business that’s come off the balance sheet?
Paul A. Ricci
To your first question, we’ve historically suggested to investors our objective was one or two points of non-GAAP operating margin improvement per year and I think arithmetically you can see within the range of our guidance that we’ve provided for the full year ’09 that we’re going to exceed that this year or are likely to exceed that this year. Thos margin improvements clearly will position us well for next year but, I want to caution against investors about extrapolating from that because we will need to make investments commensurate with the market opportunities we see.
There has been a heightened interest in speech throughout this year and we have found it important to continue to make investments in technical resources engineering and research resources as well as sales personnel and I expect that to continue going in to next year. On the second question you had, we do appreciate the point you made about the importance as we move to a more recurring business of providing additional kind of data in bookings and related metrics and we decided to do that beginning next year. We want to do that with some caution in order to make sure we have the processes and systems to supply those numbers externally which is obviously a different level of rigor than what we would need for internal data. We’ve decided to wait until next year to do that.
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