Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Kirk Materne – Rafferty Capital Markets.
Kirk Materne – Rafferty Capital Markets
Bob, maybe just to start it off can you talk a little bit about the change in the environment if you’ve seen much? Clearly, the results on a license basis in both distributed and mainframe are both a lot better sequentially and I was just trying to get some perspective on if the activity in the pipeline has picked up or if it was just better conversions on the opportunities within the pipeline for both distributed and mainframe?
Robert C. Paul
No easy answer there Kirk. I can give you a couple of variables and characteristics around the quarter. First off, typically when we’re looking at our sales commits in prior quarters last year we had a tough time holding on to the commit during the quarter and as the quarter came to an end obviously the commit came down a little bit. This is the first quarter where I’ve been here where the commit numbers actually went up at the end of the quarter.
I attribute that almost exclusively to sales operational discipline that we were implementing for about six months and now at the beginning of the fiscal year have in place around the training, around activity based management that we’re tracking globally real time and the leadership is following through and making sure it happens. I think there’s a much overall greater sense of discipline and thoughtfulness that’s going in to the sales process and execution itself.
Having said that, the tougher thing is whether the general macroeconomic conditions are changing or not. It’s tough to say because I think we’re also doing a much better job with a much sharper value proposition and a cleaner proof of concepts, cleaner implementations, those kinds of things. I would say that on the mainframe side there’s still tough battles and we’re still fighting hard and winning more than our fair share on ROI justification and so if you look at that purely on the mainframe side you’d start to think that maybe conditions were starting to change. But, it’s hard to say because it’s sort of clouded a little bit by the performance improvements that we’ve made.
Kirk Materne – Rafferty Capital Markets
Maybe just on Covisint you noted that the billings have started to trend back up on the auto side. Can you just give us some more color around that, what’s driving that? And, is that sustainable or is this a little bit of catch up? I guess just going forward on Covisint as a whole, I know you guys have been reluctant to give too much color on sort of where it is from a revenue perspective but just in terms of growth now that auto has stabilized a little bit what can we expect either from a billings perspective or a revenue perspective in terms of growth from that business or your expectations around it?
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