Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). And our first question comes from the line of Sean Wieland from Piper. Sean, you may proceed.
Sean Wieland - Piper
Hi, thanks. On this stimulus demand that you're seeing and forecasting for the fourth quarter in 2010, how do you go about quantifying what is stimulus, and what would be kind of bookings that would come through the normal channel, and then on specifically around your pipeline in software sales, exactly where are you seeing this demand? What areas of the products?
Unidentified Company Representative
I'll take a stab at it and I'll then let Marc give his commentary as well. The point of your question I'm thinking is dead on. It's difficult to determine whether when meaningful use is a definition at least of a subset of who you are and what you do it's difficult to describe what's being driven by stimulus or not. What we have looked at is the effect of stimulus as it relates to acceleration of decisions, so we can't show you that new entries into the marketplace, so people building out HITs for the first time are making decisions in a tighter time frame, so whereas before the selection process has took on average around 15 months, now we're seeing it in less than a year so they're condensing and accelerating their time frames to make decisions on average across-the-board. There are also, when I look at the competition of software, you were seeing a larger mix to new footprints and I think we spelled that out in terms of percentage of our total bookings but I think you start to see it going forward in the software category as well and then you see more software from a composition standpoint broken out in the core of what we do so by solutions, things that map directly to meaningful use. It's hard to again categorize as that $2 billion more than we would have otherwise and I think that's the label that we're putting on it right now in terms of total pipeline and activity but in any given quarter it's really difficult to break it out and say this one was absolutely stimulus driven but it by every measure is on everyone's radar, everyone is paying attention to the definition of meaningful use, mapping projects to win stimulus funds become available for meaningful use, so it's hard to quantify but it's absolutely there.
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