Key questions and answers from the second quarter fiscal 2009 earnings call conducted by CA, Inc. (CA: chart) on October 29, 2008.

John DiFucci: Operating margin exceeding what I think your low end long-term goals have been. Do you think that it's time to think about that being a little higher? Correct me if I'm wrong, your longer term goals were somewhere in the 30% to 34% range but it looks like you're there already and it looks like potentially that could improve.

Nancy Cooper: All the restructuring efforts we've done are really paying off in improved cost performance. So we're delighted to be where we are and we need to look at the guidance we gave almost a year ago.

John DiFucci: I know there's still some more on the restructuring plan. Should we assume there will be some over the next couple quarters or are you cutting back on that at this point, waiting for other opportunities?

Nancy Cooper: We guided to about 30 million of restructuring this year and we still have some facilities that we want to consolidate, so we will be continuing to pursue those, they are just taking a little longer than we thought and we feel that that will be the help on continuing to drive margin performance.

John DiFucci: Your guidance given the share count you said that doesn't include any share buybacks or any meaningful share buybacks in this particular quarter?

Nancy Cooper: That’s correct because we are really looking opportunistically to do this and we are managing cash very carefully.

John DiFucci: You mentioned you had a major product launch in October. I guess shoring up your product portfolios both through your internal development but also through opportunistic acquisition and given what's happened to the market here to a lot of people's stocks it seems to be a lot of best-in-class products out there or smaller companies that look attractive. Can you comment on that? What might you be looking at in regards to size or even the kinds of companies?

John Swainson: We're always looking. And values are better now than we've seen in some time. However, our priority has been to develop software ourselves and an example of that is the Data Center Automation Manager product that we announced in early October and we believe will be very successful in the marketplace and will give people like OpsWare and Blade Logic a real run for their money.

We have announced one very small acquisition in the security space and you will likely see us do some tackling size acquisitions at some point in the future. And it will all be around our core Enterprise IT Management portfolio and they will all be small.

Sarah Friar: On the cost side, clearly it’s great to see the benefit of some of the cuts you have done in Asia for example. Coming through on the operating margin line, are there any other kind of bigger pieces that you still see to pick up out of your attention, or is it more incremental from here?

Nancy Cooper: We still have more phases on the existing cost reductions we have done, the first one we have cost reductions really enable you to do more on that. The simplest one as we are going to rollout SAP in Europe that next year. We are looking at additional facilities that may make sense. So there are still more things CA can do.

Michael Turits: You did bring the constant currency revenue growth down to 2% from 3% at the midpoint. Is that a function of what's been going on in Asia Pac with the move to indirect or what's that primarily a function of?

Nancy Cooper: We decided to have much greater discipline on our services business and our margin in services for the quarter is 11%, which is up 7 points from last year. We’ve gone very selective and we think that’s the right strategy, but it cuts back the revenue a little bit more than we thought. We decided to go to a different model in Asia. We thought the model we were on was inefficient and we feel the approach that we shifted to was a dramatic improvement in profitability and we decided to make that decision for the long term. Short term, it did impact revenue.

Michael Turits: How did the impact of currency flow through the EPS because you're going to have it looks like 3 or 4 points flip in terms of the currency impact from what you expected? You expected 3 points of tail wind, now it looks like it's going to be a headwind and yet you've raised your EPS.

Nancy Cooper: Currency this year is a tale of two stories. One is, first half we had a positive impact and we had a negative impact in the second half if I am using Monday’s exchange rates. To bridge this impact, if you think about through the first half we have $0.80 EPS and we're talking about that $0.80, if you just duplicate it in the second half would be reduced by $0.08 strictly for currency and there are other expenses we have that occur in the second half we've mentioned before such as commissions and CA World, but sticking to currency, it has an 8 point impact.

On the operating margin, this translates into about a 2 point hit. We have incorporated this hit into the guidance we just gave, so the increase in EPS is presuming that impact on currency. If I turn over to the revenue, currency reduces the revenue to about 4.3 billion and that's also at Monday's rate and that's a reported growth of 1% for the full year. This continues to be a 2% growth on a constant currency basis, which is at the low end of our original guidance.

Richard Sherman: What was the estimated impact of the offshore HCL savings this quarter?

Nancy Cooper: HCL allowed us to make our development spending as variable, which was very helpful. We also acquired a great partner to work with and that has helped us rejuvenate the business and we're seeing good performance. So we feel very encouraged with the relationship.