Operator
Operator
Welcome to the ACI Worldwide financial results second quarter 2008 conference call. (Operator Instructions) Ms. Gerber, you may begin your conference.
ACI Worldwide, Inc. (ACIW)
Q2 2008 Earnings Call· Tue, Aug 12, 2008
$43.89
+1.20%
Same-Day
+6.94%
1 Week
+11.06%
1 Month
+30.29%
vs S&P
+32.81%
Operator
Operator
Welcome to the ACI Worldwide financial results second quarter 2008 conference call. (Operator Instructions) Ms. Gerber, you may begin your conference.
Tamar Gerber
Management
Good morning and welcome to the ACI second quarter earnings call. Joining me today as management speakers are Philip Heasley, Ron Totaro, and Scott Behrens. Available on the Q&A we will also have Mark Vipond and Richard Launder. Our customary Safe Harbor and forward-looking language applies for this call. A full discussion of the forward-looking statements can be found on our website or at the back of the earnings release and presentation which we filed this morning with the SEC. I will now turn the call over to Phil for opening remarks.
Philip G. Heasley
Management
Good morning. I’m going to make some brief overview and then hand it over to Ron. The business is performing well from a revenue/sales perspective. We’re committed to moving revenue out to deferred and backlog to cover the current period revenues. We’re focusing more on margin improvement. The sales pipeline remains strong though the sales cycle is extended. We are now live on BASE24-eps version 8.2. This is the hallmark IBM enabled with release and was generally available about 2 weeks ago. The IBM alliance has performed to expectations in the first half of 2008 and it’s clearly bringing us larger size sales opportunities. Time to close deal has lengthened, traditional selling cycle, we’ve always had was 275 to 450 days; in the last year and half to 2 years we’ve been in the 9 to 12-month cycle, we’re probably in the 15 to 18-month closing cycle right now. Moving up limitations out of backlog has become priority number one for us. More than 50% of our BASE24-eps implementations are now on the IBM environment. We are working with IBM to expedite our install timeline from a current implementation timetable of 18 to 24 months to something closer to a year to a year and a quarter. As we mentioned in our press release, we are now seeing the departure of Richard Launder who is going to be leaving in the end of February 2009. Until his departure he’s going to be working closely with me and we’re going to be concentrating on our major relationships around the world, and I’m also announcing Mark Vipond’s departure at the end of this month after 23 consecutive years and most of his adult life. This is a major change for markets and major change for the company. Global sales and product businesses…
J. Ronald Totaro
Management
Good morning everyone. It’s good to be here with all of you on the phone today. Moving to the quarter just ended, I’m going to run you through the business operations from a sales product and geographical perspective. If you turn to slide 8, you’ll see that the quarterly sales performance has exceeded that of the same period 1 year ago. Even though the overall sales figure was higher by 17%, we actually had less concentration of revenue with our largest customer sales and a wider dispersal sales dollars to more clients. We also saw a large upwards movement of implementation of professional services sales at 40% of all sales in the quarter, which is an indication that we’re expending more energy on the services implementation and ongoing services component of contracts. We’re beginning to see more services revenue built in as a feature of our new sales contract, and this has already begun to be reflected in current period revenue as well. We do not have any sizable customer losses in the quarter. We had 14 small account closures with clients using products like GoldenGate or other non-core small tool products, but no strategic customer attrition. As is evident from the strong sales performance of 17% over last year’s second quarter, we had a number of larger sales in the developed economies, but we also booked a lot of smaller transactions throughout the world. We spoke to you at the first quarter call about the Sermepa deal which closed in early May, and since then, we have also closed on a large transaction with Sterling Bank which we announced in the press release earlier in the year. During the quarter we also had sales bookings activity with processors in North America, and some of these deals were in progress…
Scott W. Behrens
Management
Good morning everyone. I’m going to take you through our numbers this morning and share some views on both the quarter in our guidance for 2008. Turning to slide 16, our GAAP revenue performance was significantly higher than last year as we did succeed in moving some large deals at a backlog, in particular the go live of FasterPay in the UK which contributed more than 39 of revenue in the quarter. In addition, as Ron mentioned, the go live of MasterCard in the US and the Middle East Switch also contributed to the overall increase in revenue year over year. Additionally, we continue to experience growth in our recurring revenue, and as a reminder, recurring revenue is being monthly license fees, maintenance, and our processing services revenue streams. That growth was concurrent with the decline in initial license fees or ILF revenue. The primary driver for the decline in the ILF revenue on a comparative basis, June 2008 compared to June 2007, was due to higher capacity deals in the prior year that did not recur in 2008. Sales rebounded in June quarter of 2008 on a sequential basis compared to the soft March quarter and/or higher comparatively to the June quarter of 2007. And as you saw in Ron’s presentation on slide 8, we do continue to experience strong growth in sales, new accounts, and new applications. Operating free cash flow was certainly not where we liked to see it, but there were timing issues both with billings and our investment decisions which contributed to the overall cash outflow in the quarter. The new Omaha office was the use of cash in both the physical buildup of the facility as well as a cash rent prepayment. OFCF was clearly impacted both positively and negatively by the go live…
Operator
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from the line of George Sutton with Craig-Hallum Capital.
George Sutton - Craig-Hallum Capital
Analyst
You mentioned that getting the implementations out of backlog is the number one priority and you did mention some work you were doing with IBM to quicken the pace. I am not real clear what specifically you are doing differently to try to accelerate that move out of backlog.
Philip G. Heasley
Management
The effort we have going with IBM is what we’re calling the payments transformation team, and what we’re doing is we’re going through an environment I said in the beginning where 50% plus of our deals are now on IBM platforms, both p and z, and at this time more p than z platforms. And what we’re doing is we kind of have our left foot in our past legacy of implementations and we have our right foot in these new eps and multi-sales kinds of deals. What we’re trying to do is put together a highly coordinated process between platform provider and the software provider instead of two different vendors showing up at the same site getting work done and we’re hoping and we’re expecting for that to be a much smoother process. That’s important, George, because when somebody has very large deals having that kind of coordination is going to be crucial aspect. We’ve gone and we’ve done very very well from a share standpoint, we’ve built a very large backlog of deals that we have to get implemented. Right now is a point that we have good controls around where we are as a business and what not and it’s time to get that historical backlog behind us and have to be more forward looking current product backlog moving forward. So, I’d like most of what we’re doing with IBM to be 8.2 going forward and these previous releases 7.4, 6.4, whatever, would like to have those all behind us and be in an 8.2 environment.
George Sutton - Craig-Hallum Capital
Analyst
You mentioned that your deal cycle is slowing a little bit and I am curious when you are going to market with IBM and you’ve got a somewhat combined hardware software package, does that not help accelerate the sales process?
Philip G. Heasley
Management
I think two things have happened there. One is there has been a definite slowdown. I would tell you that we are better at measuring and what not, but our pipeline is probably better than it has been since I’ve been here. Getting that pipeline to closure is clearly taking longer; instead of going through a capital approval once, goes three times or whatever. We’ve not really seen any deals being pulled off the table except for some really small low-medium to small kinds of companies and in the 25% to 50% probability ranges in the pipeline, not further up in the pipeline. In the very larger deals, I think the larger deals are having more scrutiny. So even if we have more coordination with IBM there is more scrutiny going on in these deals, and in a very large deal, stage one of doing a deal is doing a proof of concept, and you don’t really get the final deal until you combine go and do your… You may be chosen and what not, and then you go through this proof of concept kind of deal and then you move into the next step. That also slows the growth in the actual backlog and the growth in the business by the very large deals having that extra step.
Operator
Operator
And the next question comes from Zachary Shafran with Waddell & Reed. Zachary Shafran - Waddell & Reed: Two questions. I am wondering what you can say about the amount of headcount that’s now being dedicated to implementation generally and then specifically from IBM. And then second question, as you’ve talked about lengthening sales cycles, if you can be more specific and may be talk about if you are seeing anything different from a competitive standpoint?
Philip G. Heasley
Management
What’s your question, how many people do we have devoted to implementation? Zachary Shafran - Waddell & Reed: Yes. Generally and then specifically, how many are IBM versus third party versus ACI.
Philip G. Heasley
Management
Direct ACI is about 500 people. We’ve actually had a good R&D year and we’ve actually had efficiencies in R&D, but all the efficiencies in R&D have been reinvested in getting these projects done. So, we’re probably devoting closer to 600 of our people on average in terms of it. And I think we spent $6 million in contractors in the last quarter. IBM’s actual supply of people except on a great year basis at this point has been very little. We are working with them in terms of rebuilding the process, but that’s a goal forward in our streamlining the process, but they’ve actually put very few people in. Zachary Shafran - Waddell & Reed: Will they be adding people over time?
Philip G. Heasley
Management
I think what we’re going to do is decide what IBM does in the joint installation with the blue stack and then what we do. So I actually believe that we’re going to be doing more that surrounds our payment domain and they’re going to be doing more that surrounds their IO or which is the interface between our payments domain and their actual physical environment. So, I actually think that we’ll be doing more of what we’re experts at and they’ll start doing more of what they’re experts at, but we’ll do it in a joint versus a co-primes versus two separate vendors.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Brett Huff with Stephens Inc.
Brett Huff - Stephens Inc.
Analyst · Stephens Inc.
A couple of quick questions; on the rationalizing or the cost reduction that you all talked a little bit about in your prepared remarks and in the release, I am sure you are in the planning stages now, but can you give us some more details on when we’ll start seeing some of that show up in the expense lines and sort of where the focus is and where that expense might hit on which OpEx line?
Phillip G. Heasley
Analyst · Stephens Inc.
I’ll let Ron and Scott answer that. I will tell you that it’s probably more further along than you think. There’s an awful lot of initiatives that are actually well defined and Ron has been a very busy guy for the last 5 months.
J. Ronald Totaro
Management
Yeah. We had a management meeting two weeks ago which sort of culminated in 5 months of effort; sort of been a bottoms-up assessment of the business looking where our growth opportunities are coming from, looking at areas where there is duplication; frankly we haven’t done a great job in the past with some of the integration of our acquisitions; so it was just a step-back approach to see how do we best align our resources for growth, and also given that we have the IBM alliance, we’re committed to doing business in different ways and we have different interactions to consider as we think about how we’re going about our day to day. So, having said that, we looked at the market opportunity and we looked at the implementation services, we looked at our 5-year sales broadcast and projected where our business is going to come from, and from that we said, “Okay, how do we start to move our resources around?” That process will begin in September. Some of these events will happen fairly quickly. Others have been identified, but they will take another 6 to 12 months to evolve. So, we’re pretty excited about where we are at as a management team; again, there are a lot of people at ACI involved with this bottoms-up approach, but we need to focus to execute certainly.
Scott W. Behrens
Management
I guess from a geography on the P&L and in terms of where the cost reductions are going to come from and where the expenses are going to be charged, it’s really a broad-based plan. So, you are going to see expenses really across all the expense categories being reduced on a go-forward basis to some degree, and we haven’t quite quantified what that is per expense line item, but it is a broad-based restructuring plan.
Brett Huff - Stephens Inc.
Analyst · Stephens Inc.
And so in that it’ll be both OpEx and in cost of sales or mostly in OpEx?
Scott W. Behrens
Management
You will see it across all, the cost of sales lines as well as the operating expense line, but again to what extent, the magnitude on each line, we’re not at this point prepared to quantify that, but we will see both cash and GAAP expenditure on the personnel displacement and then we’ll also see benefits on each line prospectively starting as early as Q4 this year.
Brett Huff - Stephens Inc.
Analyst · Stephens Inc.
And my second question is; on the two folks who are leaving, one in August and one in February, insofar as this was planned, did we know about this as we were thinking about the analyst day and things like that, I mean, when was this planning sort of started and can you give us a sense of that timeline?
Phillip G. Heasley
Analyst · Stephens Inc.
Can you ask the question again, and I will tell you whether I can answer it or not.
Brett Huff - Stephens Inc.
Analyst · Stephens Inc.
Just the timeline on when we knew about when the two folks were leaving.
Phillip G. Heasley
Analyst · Stephens Inc.
I don’t think I would say anything other than we’ve been timely. You are talking about us communicating with you?
Brett Huff - Stephens Inc.
Analyst · Stephens Inc.
Yeah.
Phillip G. Heasley
Analyst · Stephens Inc.
I don’t think we were ready to communicate it till a very recent time period.
Brett Huff - Stephens Inc.
Analyst · Stephens Inc.
Okay. That’s all I needed. Thanks.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Tom McCrohan with Janney Montgomery Scott
Tom McCrohan - Janney Montgomery Scott
Analyst · Janney Montgomery Scott
Sequential increase in the 60-month backlog, what proportion of that do you think is attributable to the IBM alliance?
Scott W. Behrens
Management
I don’t think I have that information. You are talking about the 60-month backlog increase from March to June.
Tom McCrohan - Janney Montgomery Scott
Analyst · Janney Montgomery Scott
Yeah. I am sort of just adding to a little comment on IBM, just trying to look for a method that we can use to kind of track the progress of success joint selling with IBM.
Scott W. Behrens
Management
Right now we’re not, at least in these early stages, are not breaking out our backlog into IBM and non-IBM frankly, especially in these early days. As the activity increases over time, maybe that’s something that we’ll look at, but right now we’re not prepared to do that.
Tom McCrohan - Janney Montgomery Scott
Analyst · Janney Montgomery Scott
Okay. Fair enough. And Scott, on your comments on the cash flow dynamics, although I know there are a lot of moving parts in there and you kind of have to do a little estimation about how you build up more cash spent upon the implementation, but can you give us any insight into the moving parts going into the second half; what would contribute to improvements in cash flow, and I am particularly looking at the deferred revenue line for the 6 months on your cash flow statement where it is really down dramatically from the 6-month period last year. So if you can just talk through how you see the dynamics in cash flow improving in the second half with particular emphasis on which moving parts relate to the deferred revenue.
Scott W. Behrens
Management
Obviously the driver of deferred revenue in the June quarter this year was really pulling out of deferred revenue some of the large projects, FasterPay, MasterCard, Middle East Switch, pulling those out of deferred revenue and bringing those into the GAAP revenues in the quarter. For the second half of the year, obviously the deferred revenue is going to be driven by our sales before grasping our ability to hit that. Obviously, we’re still shooting for $430 to $440 million in sales; so obviously closing those deals and the cash events that correspond with closing those deals as well as the continuing implementation and hitting milestones, we should see increases in the deferred revenue, but at the same it’s a combination of closed deals implementation, but we are also expecting to go live with other projects. So, we’re going to have ebbs and flows in that deferred revenue as we go throughout the year.
Tom McCrohan - Janney Montgomery Scott
Analyst · Janney Montgomery Scott
Is it fair to assume that when you do sell a large deal that does have these implementation milestones, that ACI still receives a portion of cash upfront or is there any change going on in how you negotiate those deals where you don’t collect any money upfront, you say, until we hit milestone 123 and then you pay us.
Scott W. Behrens
Management
No, generally speaking upon signing a deal and on hitting the milestones, those are going to be cash events, but the magnitude of those are going to be depending on; historically we may have significant discounted a deal to get the cash upfront, but we won’t enter into that sort of a contract if it is disadvantageous to us from an economic perspective.
Phillip G. Heasley
Analyst · Janney Montgomery Scott
That having been said, the two largest deals that we closed in this quarter had very very little cash on signing and almost all the cash on milestones.
Tom McCrohan - Janney Montgomery Scott
Analyst · Janney Montgomery Scott
That explains some of it. And my last question is for Ron. Ron, on slide 11 you introduced a new slide that had a lot of information on it. I am just wondering if you could just give us the primary takeaways for that slide and including a definition for total economic value of sales. And that’s all I have. Thanks.
J. Ronald Totaro
Management
Yeah. I think slide 11 was the slide that Tamar was asked to provide from a prior analyst call showing sort of a timeline of how revenues were evolving, and I think the takeaway here as it may relate to some of the cash questions that are on term extension and how that business is evolving, it you look a March 2007 term extension number of $43 million to 06/30/2008 of $15 million, you see that as we take in less in term extension, that’s going to have more of a negative impact on cash as our mix of sales is going to new apps and new accounts.
Philip G. Heasley
Management
I think an important point o understand here in terms of understanding the terms of cash, especially the Americas is doing a very good job in terms of renewing the business at reasonable margins, and what’s happening is that that’s extending where we tended to renew an account on average of 48-month and 60-month contract or whatever in the 40th month, these contracts now are running much later. They’re coming much closer to closure, so that represents a deferral with a margin of opportunity versus a sale now with a lower margin opportunity, and I would take that tradeoff from a business standpoint and the fact that new applications and new accounts are continuing to move strong and then renewals of our business are being paid for more volume for the business that we’re doing is going through this metamorphosis that we said it was. If I were a betting person, I would have thought that without the economic problem that the banks are going through, we’d probably have less push back in terms of getting our fair payment. Right now, with the budget pressures they’re having and what not, that’s being extended. That’s not lost business. That’s delayed business, but it’s both delayed cash as well as delayed sales. From a backlog perspective, it still keeps sitting there in the 60-month backlog as a renewal account, so that’s the dynamic. It’s mostly in the US. In terms of the deals, they’re closing. They are succeeding, and I think it’s the right strategy, and I continue to support them on that, and what page 11 does is that it lets you see in a granular basis how the sales are coming across and then as well as by the different types of things we sell, so you can kind of make 11 and 12 make sense of each other a little bit, and then your question about economic value, we just make sure that we value sales the same way we value backlog, so that there’s no translation from when it goes to sales into backlog.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of John Kraft with D.A. Davidson. John Kraft – D.A. Davidson: First question is for Richard. It sounds like you’re staying around until around February. Are you going to be full time or act as a consultant?
Richard Launder
Analyst
I’ll be full time and helping whoever is filling that position as well as anyone who wants me to help, so I’ll be full time. John Kraft – D.A. Davidson: Phil, earlier in your prepared comments you mentioned that you’re having some success in the smaller institutions’ sales in the small institutions here, and it doesn’t sound like that’s a function or an effect of the IBM relationship. Are there trends to see here, or is that simply a function of the longer sales cycle in the larger banks, and is that primarily domestic?
Philip G. Heasley
Management
It is not primarily domestic. It’s primarily EMEA, and I think the reason we’re seeing a larger number of smaller sales is that it’s a less arduous process for them. It’s more the developing world, whether it’s the Middle East or whether it’s in Asia Pacific and what not. They’re very actively trying to get into the global business system and build payment systems, and their deals are just coming to closure faster. It’s funny; we’re booking more deals as a percent, but we have more megadeals in our pipeline than we’ve ever had before, and those megadeals are just going to take longer to work their way through the system. John Kraft – D.A. Davidson: Okay, that’s helpful. Scott, the sales and marketing expense line was higher certainly sequentially. Were there any one-time items there, and also can you talk about the timing of commission payouts for Sterling and Sermepa?
Scott W. Behrens
Management
Well, I would say really it’s much of an effect in there in terms of marketing events. It’s really personnel and related costs, like higher headcount to work on the IBM alliance sales initiative than any marketing commission expenses. It’s just really higher value deal and higher sales volume compared to last year, so the payout on those particular deals, I couldn’t tell you off hand in terms of their timing, but obviously depending on when they close in the quarter, there’s some lag period between the sales close date and the commission payment date, but it does vary by customer. It depends on the marketing commission plan, so I don’t have that information on those particular deals.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Gil Luria with Wedbush Morgan Securities. Gil Luria – Wedbush Morgan Securities: I had a couple more question on IBM. In terms of the milestones that you’ve set with IBM, are you still hitting all those? Are you still on track to getting more of the incentive payments from IBM?
Philip G. Heasley
Management
From a sales standpoint, we met or slightly exceeded our first half goals, so that’s done. As it relates to our enablement projects, we told you we made 8.2. We’re actually slightly delayed as it relates to what we initially thought we were going to do. Some of that has to do with the amount of time we took for planning, saying this is what we think we are going to do, and then once we finalized it, so that’s been a little bit delayed, and Gil, we’re definitely on schedule in terms of our earning whatever additional dollars that are out there. Gil Luria – Wedbush Morgan Securities: And the sales that you’re generating, to the extent that they’re also new sales for IBM, are you also collecting commissions from IBM for the boxes that they sell?
Philip G. Heasley
Management
We’ve redacted an awful lot of that contract, but the whole idea is for us to be incentivized is that it incents us every time we do joint deals together, and of course none of that shows up in GAAP, and we’ve been very clear about the cash that’s come through, and the reason it doesn’t show up in GAAP, I’ll defer to Scott, but that has to do with the equity accounting and what not. Scott?
Scott W. Behrens
Management
Right, as we’ve talked about in the past, there are obviously three components to the Alliance deal, with them being the warrants that we granted, the technical development spend, and then also incentives on sales, but from an accounting model perspective, really any incremental dollars that we received as a part of the incentives on sales would all be deferred till we reach the end of the development period, so there’s no P&L recognition of any of that until we’re completed with the technical development of milestones. Gil Luria – Wedbush Morgan Securities: So, you wouldn’t even get those incentives for sales until you’re done developing the product?
Scott W. Behrens
Management
On sales, it depends. It depends on the sales efforts between now and when we completed with the technical development projects, so obviously there are different triggers throughout the agreement based on when we get certain levels of sales, so it’s really driven by the agreement.
Philip G. Heasley
Management
Gil, to answer your question, we get the cash and we get the cash up front. That’s why people said that that’s real cash, and I said it’s absolutely positively real cash. Right? We have to earn every penny of that cash, so that has to do with that. As it relates to GAAP, it doesn’t show up in GAAP till we go through this completion process, as Scott just was explaining, but as it relates to cash, we have been getting it, and we will be getting it. We just can’t call it GAAP revenue till we hit that completion point, and that’s why I get little agitated when people say well the IBM cash is really not real cash. It is absolutely positively real cash, and we’ve spend a king’s ransom in terms of investing behind this and what not, so from a cash standpoint, that is real cash payments to us. It’s our money, and that’s why that first large chunk of it is nonrefundable.
Scott W. Behrens
Management
Right. And what you can watch is and we disclosed in our Q is the amount of cash that we’ve received and advance of it becoming essentially nonrefundable. A portion of what we receive is still refundable, and that is subject to hitting milestones whether it is technical development or sales milestones, so as that nonrefundable portion grows, that’s indicative of us hitting various milestones within the agreement, so for the most part, we have received cash in advance of it entirely being nonrefundable in terms of the different deliverables under the alliance agreement. Gil Luria – Wedbush Morgan Securities: On that topic, of your operating free cash flow guidance of $65, I think we previously talked about the fact that about $50 million of that you were counting was from IBM. Of the new $45 to $50 million guidance, how much of that is IBM cash?
Scott W. Behrens
Management
I don’t think at this point we are revising or changing that original $50 million. I don’t think anything has really changed that would drive that number up or down from the original guidance we gave. Gil Luria – Wedbush Morgan Securities: One last question. In terms of de-emphasizing some of your products, which of the products are the ones that you are going to de-emphasize as you go through a restructuring?
Mark Vipond
Analyst
We are in the process of making those decisions right now. This is definitely a scenario as Phil pointed to. We are looking to increase investment and wholesale and fraud, and to do that, this company hasn’t really sunset products in the past in an aggressive way, so there is an opportunity that sort of reallocates some resources to the products that we are not forecasting to have huge growth in, where we may move some of our development resources to higher growth areas as we look for third party alternatives to help beef ourselves up, so these are all the dynamics that during the month of September we’ll be finalizing.
Philip G. Heasley
Management
But, Gil, we have a myriad of products that we have either purchased or developed in the past that where we have “sunset” them and we’ve never really brought them to end of life or put them on a time and material kind of basis, which I’m not going to tell you point in verse what they are, but it’s fairly obvious that it’s not EPS, so we are talking about not a generation ago or this generation. We are talking about two, three, four, five generations or miscellaneous wired kinds of stuff, and there are certain of our tools that just don’t make sense anymore whatsoever too, so I mean there is actually some on the tool side also. Gil Luria – Wedbush Morgan Securities: Actually, let me ask one more question. The faster payment revenue. Is there any of that in the third quarter or fourth or was that all in the second quarter?
Scott W. Behrens
Management
We’re going to have some FasterPay revenue still going forward. There is one customer that still has to reach their phase one go-live, and that’ll occur in the second quarter, and then we have other, and as we go into phase two of FasterPay, there will be continuing revenue streams amongst all the banks that were in the FasterPay, so we do have some continuing revenue coming through.
Philip G. Heasley
Management
And they are going into maintenance. We’ll start getting maintenance. On the cash side, we didn’t bill that $5 million you talked about. It’s actually $5 million in cash that we were owed, half of which we have been paid since the quarter closed. And on SPAN, those projects haven’t all closed out in Saudi Arabia either. There were twelve banks involved in that, and they are not all done yet either, so there will be some third quarter close also.
Operator
Operator
Your next question comes from line of Michael Christodolou with Inwood Capital. Michael Christodolou – Inwood Capital: A couple of sets of questions. First, I noticed there was no stock buyback in the quarter, and I’m curious if you were blacked out at all due to either the restructuring or the management departures. Can you remind us what is left on the authorization?
Scott W. Behrens
Management
We did not have any formal or official blackout. We generally look at the cash buyback as a very good use of cash when we are not investing in the business, and obviously this quarter, we had a significant investment in services implementations, and obviously as we look forward, we are going have a near term use of cash involved with restructuring efforts, so that is about all we can say on that. I don’t have the dollar amount handy in terms of the amount that is left on the buyback. We can get back to you with that information. (pauses) $86 million. Michael Christodolou – Inwood Capital: Phil, you used the phrase pigs passing through the python with respect to certain projects, and clearly in this quarter, a few passed through. I’m wondering if you can give us any further thoughts, I guess, just on the business over the next 3 to 9 quarters. You have always been talking about a 3- to 5-quarter kind of transition period converting the deferred revenue to sales and revenues, and it seems like a little bit more of a delay here because of industry dynamics and a little bit more management change and another restructuring, and I saw that you even joined another board the other day, and I’m kind of curious about where you see the next several quarters and how you are spending your time?
Philip G. Heasley
Management
Operator
Operator
Your final question is a followup from Nikolai Fisken with Stephens, Inc.
Nikolai Fisken - Stephens, Inc.
Analyst
Have you guys dramatically increased your professional services rate in some set products? How are your competitors trying to capitalize on that?
Philip G. Heasley
Management
Let’s put it this way. We had the unfortunate behavior of charging certain customers less than it costs us to supply them services. This was largely in the United States, and we brought in a general manager who put together an SG&A team that was able to make it really clear that this was a behavior that had to change. We are still in a situation in the US that we could actually probably do more services if we had more trained experts in payments than we do right now or if we didn’t need our people for other key installations that are going on around the world. I don’t believe that move was anything but a move to sanity. Certainly, we’ve not gone to some grievous rate structure that allows people to drive tanks underneath us. I think we’ve done quite the opposite. I think we’ve gotten ourselves to a rational environment.
Nikolai Fisken - Stephens, Inc.
Analyst
Okay, so how are the competitors trying to capitalize on sun-setting products?
Philip G. Heasley
Management
Well, I’m sure there are going to be some people that are going to try to capitalize. We have competitors that are showing up all kinds of deals and I think the proof is in the pudding. When it comes to medium to large banks, we have a dominating share in terms of that business. People can go and say, “Well, gee, we lost 15 Windows-based deals to some competitor.” Well, we’re going to continue to lose Windows-based deals because we don’t have Windows-based kind of products, so it a mom-and-pop needs a low-value box kind of structure, we’re going to lose out to mom-and-pop or Windows-based kinds of environment. We’ve decided not to play in that space because it’s hard to sell Rolexes and Timexes because you’ll end up selling your Timexes because of the prices. We have enough other opportunities not to do that. So, no, that’s not a concern. My biggest concern is to take this very valuable customer base that we have that has a large inventory of installation that they’re waiting for us to complete, and get those completed. I mean quite honestly if things speed up a little bit and we were to get every sale we wanted this year and it all came in the fourth quarter, that would be the absolute best possible thing for this company because this company really needs to have a more manageable backlog, and I would just assume we wouldn’t start working those installations any sooner than if we did the sale in the second or third quarter. As it relates to these renewal guys, I’m not worried about these big customers. I’m not going to talk about who they are, but they’re very large customers, and we’re not going to be jerks, and they’re not going…
Operator
Operator
There are no questions at this time.
Tamar Gerber
Management
Thank you for joining us.