Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Bryan Keane - Credit Suisse
Bryan Keane - Credit Suisse
I wanted to ask as the demand comes back and hiring picks up can you keep the offshore utilization this high, I think it was 74% for the quarter or should that drop as we pick up the hiring?
Gordon Coburn
You’ll see more volatility in the utilization number including the trainees because we’ll be bringing on a bunch of trainees. Excluding trainees we’re pretty much at our target level. We’ll have some volatility up and down but no material trends one way or the other.
Bryan Keane - Credit Suisse
I’d like to ask about pricing, what’s the pricing environment look like right now? There’s been a lot of talk about wage inflation in the industry. Some of your competitors have been talking about increasing wages. Can you talk about what you guys are doing there?
Gordon Coburn
Pricing is playing out the way we expected. It was essentially stable during the third quarter. It was up a little bit onsite, down a little bit offshore. Some of that offshore was mix as BPO and ITIS obviously grew faster then the rest of the business. I think a message quite consistent with what a lot of the other top players are saying that there’s certainly stability in the market in terms of pricing.
Wage inflation for 2009 we’ve taken the approach of clearly sharing the success of the company this year with our employees and as I mentioned we increased our variable compensation accruals and we expect to payout healthy bonuses to our employees who made the success possible. Obviously there are two ways we could have done it in 2009; we could have increased base salary like a couple of our competitors have done. We think it’s more appropriate to have a direct link between performance and rewards for our employees. We think our employees are going to be happy and we keep that as a variable expense.
For 2010, too early to know how things will play out.
Operator
Your next question comes from Rod Bourgeois - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
Rod Bourgeois - Sanford Bernstein & Co.
I wanted to inquire about the budgeting process. Are you getting early signs that this will be more of a normal budget timing season or are you expecting that we may have hiccups in the budgeting process as we’ve had in past year. If you can specify when at this point you expect to get clarity on your clients 2010 plans that would be very helpful.
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