I wanted to understand the reduction in the average term length. Is it influenced at all by when a customer decides to pay over time on their contract rather than up front, or is it purely influenced by the contract length that they choose?
Charlie Peters
It’s with the contract length that they choose. There are two factors. One is the length and one is the payment.
Kevin Buttigieg – FTN Equity Capital Markets
Okay two different factors and then just any quick comments if you could make as far as the advanced platform trends particularly in light of some of the pricing actions by some of the competitors in recent months.
Charlie Peters
I think the advanced platform continues to make good progress and as we’ve been saying for a while now, as new customers come on and adopt RHEL 5, many of them are going to advanced platform and existing customers as they upgrade and many of them still are on older versions and will upgrade when the right time comes, will move some of their subscriptions to advanced platform. It’s a continual trend I think more and more toward the higher price point but it’s sort of a gradual slope. I don’t see any step change in that.
Tom McCallum
Next question please.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Brad Whitt of Broadpoint AmTech. Your line is now open.
Brad Whitt – Broadpoint Amtech
Hey guys thanks for taking my question, just looking at the channel contributions this quarter, 61% a little ahead of our expectations. How would you characterize that? Did you see a little weakness from your internal sales organization, if you could just give some more color around that?
Jim Whitehurst
Yeah just quickly on that, yeah typically the multiyear long-term deals are done by the direct sales force and as we said, some of those went to single year deals or single year payment and so that relatively impacted that balance.
Brad Whitt – Broadpoint Amtech
Okay that makes sense and also if you could share with us some of the things that you’re doing to try and enhance renewals from a channel, anything specific that you can share there.
Jim Whitehurst
We’ve been working hard and we have made a lot of progress in changing contract terms with a number of our distribution partners so we get access to the names. We’ve also put specific programs in place and actually hired a third party firm especially for some of our channel partners who don’t want to disclose the customers to us, to go after those renewals with our partners. We’ve done a lot of work educating our partners. The cost to get a renewal, as several of our partners have agreed now, is about a third of the cost of getting new business. So they now see the value and we have processes in place to go after it. So certainly our channel renewal rates are going up and going in the right direction.
Tom McCallum
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