Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Our first question comes from the line of Mark Murphy of Piper Jaffray. You may proceed.
Mark Murphy - Piper Jaffray
Yes. Thank you very much. Congrats on the strength. I am wondering what type of economic assumption is embedded into your 2010 guidance. I think yesterday Infosys were saying that IT budgets will be flat year-over-year in 2010 and others are saying those could be up 3 or 4%, so just curious to get your viewpoint there?
Sohaib Abbasi
Thank you, Mark. We believe that as a result of greater scrutiny in terms of the IT budget, the budgets are being realigned and are now helping Informatica position data integration as a much higher priority item. There have been surveys that have been conducted by our customers that indicate that data integration has become a much greater priority. The reason for this is that we are enabling IT initiatives that are very closely associated with either business survival, operational efficiency, cost reduction strategies or with business survival identifying who are the top customers and what are the most promising products.
So, having a value proposition would just do more with that as well as a very compelling business value of enabling their business survival and business survival strategies has elevated the importance and priority of data integration. In fact, Gartner also in their survey identified that data integration was now one of the hottest segments. I’d also like to ask Earl for his comments.
Earl Fry
Yes. I don’t think we have a strong opinion on kind of the macro scenario for IT spends, whether you want to paint a flat scenario or a very slow growth scenario. I think the important thing is that there is relative certainty in the budgets and that you don’t have any kind of major events going on.
So, the way I would think about it is, prospects or customers that are still wrestling with survival mode, and so it would characterize it will probably be closer to the flat IT spends. Companies and prospects, customers that are looking at revival mode clearly will have some degree of growth and may be meaningful growth in their IT budget. I think in either case, we should be beneficiaries of that. Clearly with companies that are in revival mode, we could see much broader use of our technologies.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Tom Ernst of Deutsche. You may proceed.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
