Hank Diamond – Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance Gene Hall – Chief Executive Officer Chris Lafond – Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Jeff King – William Blair Peter Appert – Piper Jaffrey Dave Lewis – JPMorgan Brian Murphy – Sidoti & Company

Good morning and welcome to Gartner, Incorporated earnings conference call for the fourth quarter and full year 2008. (Operator Instructions). I will now turn the conference call over to Mr. Hank Diamond, Group Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance for opening remarks and introductions. Please go head, sir.

Good morning everyone and thank you all for joining us. On the call with me today are Gartner's CEO, Gene Hall and CFO Chris Lafond. Before we discuss our results I would like to remind everyone of four things. First, the rebroadcast, reproduction and retransmission of this conference call or webcast without the express written consent of Gartner are strictly prohibited. Second, if you did not receive a copy of our press release it is available on our website at www.gartner.com or on the FirstCall system. Third, the company will be making statements about its future results and other forward-looking statements during this call. Statements about future results made during the call constitute forward-looking statement within the meaning of the Private Securities and Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on current expectations and the current economic environment. Forward-looking statements and projections are inherently subject to significant economic competitive and other uncertainties and contingencies which are beyond the control of management. The company cautions that these statements are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Important assumptions and other important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements and projections, are specified in the company's filings with the SEC, including in its annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal year 2007. Finally, during the call the company will be using certain non-GAAP financial measures as defined under SEC rules. Where required we have provided a reconciliation of those measures to the most direct comparable GAAP measures in the tables and the press release. Before I turn the call over to our CEO, let me briefly review the major points from today's press release. At December 31, 2008, contract value,…

Thanks, Hank. Good morning everyone and thanks for joining us. During 2008 Gartner grew its total revenue by 9%, including 15% growth in revenue from our research segment. We expanded our profit margins. We generated $184 million of operating cash flow, added new clients and ended the year with record contract value. We achieved these results despite an already weak economic environment which deteriorated sharply and rapidly during the fourth quarter. Our results demonstrate the tremendous value that our services provide to our clients, our vast market opportunity and the effective management of IT programs and investments is always a critical business function. Even during the fourth quarter when macroeconomic conditions worsened substantially, we were able to grow our revenue and EPS due to the resiliency of our resulting research and consulting businesses. Although companies became increasingly more cautious on spending in November and December, both our existing and potential clients continue to recognize the importance of using Gartner services. As a result we were able to deliver 11% FX neutral growth in research revenues and 8% FX neutral growth in consulting revenues. In research we grew contract value to a record of $834 million at December 31st. Up 8% year-over-year excluding the impact of foreign exchange. This growth was broad-based across all industry sectors, including financial services, and was driven by sales to both existing clients and new client enterprises. We added 201 net new enterprises as clients in the fourth quarter, growing our base of client enterprises by 3% versus the third quarter and 5% year-over-year. We were also successful at renewing business with existing clients as demonstrated by our 82% client retention rate and 98% wallet retention rate. Overall the majority of our contract value growth continued to come from volume versus price. Now these results are…

Thanks, Gene, and good morning. I'll start today with a review of our full year results and fourth quarter results and finish with a discussion of our full year outlook. Our fourth quarter revenue and earnings results were in line with the guidance we provided in our third quarter earnings release despite an economic environment that as you know deteriorated significantly and rapidly during the quarter. On an FX neutral basis total revenues for the fourth quarter increased 6% over 2007. EBITDA and EPS were also in line with expectations, including the costs related to the elimination of approximately 120 positions, which we announced on January 8th. We have seen continued demand for our products and services in this environment because organizations have a critical need to reduce costs and effectively manage their IT programs and investments regardless of the economy. Let me now discuss each of our business segments in more detail. In research, year-over-year FX neutral revenue growth was 11% for the fourth quarter and 14% for the full year. Despite the environment we delivered both sequential and year-over-year growth in contract value. On December 31st contract was a record $834 million, up 11% year-over-year and 3% sequentially. On an FX neutral basis contract value [increased] 8% from December '07. Our client retention rates increased slightly from Q3 to 82% and remained at the levels experienced throughout 2007 and early 2008. At 98% our wallet retention rate also remained in the range we expected. These retention rates demonstrate that the demand from our existing clients for our research services remain solid. I will point out, however, that our clients' ability to increase their spend at the levels we experienced in 2007 is clearly being impacted by the economic environment. Growth in contract value also came from gaining new…

(Operator instructions) You have a question from Jeff King – William Blair. Jeff King – William Blair: Hey guys. Could you talk about how much your sales cycles have lengthened and also if business was weaker in the enterprise or the middle market?

Basically we haven’t measure precisely how much the sales cycles have lengthened, but looking we do reviews very frequently of individual deals and it’s our observation that the number of steps it takes to get a deal closed are more than they were a year ago. And as I mentioned in my comments, in many cases, in most cases, if you went back a year ago in past times you wouldn’t have to take any of our, most of our contracts up to being signed off by a CFO of the company. Now, because the cost controls many companies have put in place, people still want to buy but they have to go through our clients who want to buy it, they have to go through more hurdles internally to get it approved, and that’s lengthening the sales cycle. And so we haven’t measured it precisely but it’s very obvious that that’s what’s going on. If you look at it in terms of by – if you look at our performance across industries and size of companies we’ve had similar performance across all industries and all sizes of companies in all geographies for that matter with APEC being slightly better, but the performance has been equal across all of those. So we haven’t seen the smaller companies get worse than larger companies or something like that, and same thing by industry. Jeff King – William Blair: Could you guys also talk about your consulting business? So are projects being canceled or are they just shortening?

So as you saw in our consulting business we actually exceeded our expectations in Q4. What we’re seeing on a go forward basis is not projects being cancelled but just that our backlog is down more than we would have expected. And so that’s sort of what’s been going on. So it’s not projects being cancelled, it’s more just fewer new projects. One thing Chris mentioned is our contract authorization services are not included in our backlog and so it doesn’t reflect that. Jeff King – William Blair: But could you just comment on why you think the backlog is down so much?

Well, I think it’s a combination of two things. First, part of it is the extended selling cycles and that has an impact on consulting just like it does on research. It takes more steps to get consulting projects done. And secondly, I think more companies have kind of blanket limits on new consulting contracts compared to research where that doesn’t apply. So there’s some companies just would say we’re cutting consulting. Jeff King – William Blair: And then one final question is would you expect your events margin to actually be higher in 2009?

No, I wouldn’t say that. I think the way we looked at our expectations in the guidance we’ve given is there’s a couple of things. Number one, we certainly eliminated a number of lower margin events so on the face of it you would think the margin would increase. However, we’ve also expected that our existing ongoing events will have lower attendees and exhibitors than the prior years which will put pressure on the margin, so obviously there is some fixed cost to holding an event and at lower attendees and exhibitors that’s kind of what you would expect. So I would not expect that sort of increase so that’s not the expectation you should have.

Your next question comes from Peter Appert – Piper Jaffray. Peter Appert – Piper Jaffray: Gene, the guidance for research in ’09 is relative to at least the strength you saw in the fourth quarter seems pretty cautionary, and I guess appropriately so, but should we interpret from that that you’ve seen some further significant deterioration in the January sales trends?

No, you should not. Basically it purely reflects, that guidance purely reflects what we saw in Q4 and it basically reflects the down tick in retention that you saw, the slight down tick in retention, and there’s also been a modest down tick in the amount of new business. When we look at that over the course of 2009 that’s what gives us that result. Chris, you want to comment?

Peter, I think Gene is exactly right. I think as our contract value continues to increase a couple of point movement in retention has some fairly significant impacts and as Gene mentioned we started to see a modest decline on a year-over-year basis in new business. So the combination of those two things certainly puts pressure on the early part of the year and it’s far too early for us to look all the way out to the end of the year, but those are the things that I think we thought about as we looked at the research guidance. Peter Appert – Piper Jaffray: In the fourth quarter, I think I heard you correctly, right, you said you had 928 sales people at the end of the year?

That’s correct. Peter Appert – Piper Jaffray: Okay, so you did step up the hiring in the fourth quarter. How do you square that with the more cautionary view that you were seeing as the quarter progressed?

Because of the extended selling cycles our sales productivity has declined and that’s kind of what’s going on. So while we still see good demand, and I’ll just use it illustratively, if it used to take three steps to get a deal closed and now it takes six, our sales productivity declines off of that, and that’s kind of what’s going on in terms of the capacity.

One other thing I'd comment on is if you remember after the second quarter call we started aggressively recruiting, so some of the fourth quarter hiring you saw was actually people we hired in the third quarter. So as I said during my comments when we started to really see the fourth quarter change dramatically we slowed that down but we honored all the commitments to previous hiring because we still think it’s a good idea to have that capacity. So that’s how you should think about. You shouldn’t think that we were still plowing ahead making offers in Q4. In fact we slowed that down as we saw Q4 play out. The other thing I would comment on just in terms of the research segment and our continued hiring is you should not expect; we’re not expecting any degradation in the research margin. So as I said during my comments our guidance and the impact on guidance is really driven out of the consulting events segments not of any degradation in the overall margin rates in our research business. Peter Appert – Goldman Sachs: And then, Gene, finally you started your comments with some fairly strong statements with regard to your view as to the criticality of the Gartner product, etc. How do you square that then against the deteriorating sales trends?

So again, Peter, what's going on is clients want to buy our products. The internal hurdles they have to go through to get things approved are a lot tougher than they were if you went back a year ago. I'll give you kind of an extreme case. Again, as I said, we review deals all of the time. There was a client we have where the CIO was fired and they put the IT Department reporting into the head of HR. The people who worked for the CIO all signed contracts with us to buy new services, the head of HR basically then said I'm not going to let you buy anything right now until the new CIO comes on board because some of you guys might not even be working here anymore. And so it wasn't lack of demand it was the internal difficulty that many companies have are slowing down the processes. I've seen many clients like where a new CIO comes on board and they get approved, but it took a lot longer and a lot more sales effort than it did before. That's different than if we were seeing that people in stable situations were just saying, oh we don't need Gartner anymore. We're not seeing that. We're seeing people, that our demand, fundamental demand is just as strong as ever. But the steps required to get a contract closed with all of the organizational chaos, the economic dislocations that are going on and the tight cost controls companies have in place just makes the selling cycle a lot longer than it used to be.

One other comment I would make as most of Gene's comments were around kind of existing clients and what we're seeing there. But also just to be clear on new clients we talked about it during our comments is we did penetrate new clients during the quarter. We were able to sign growth deals with new clients. So even in challenging environments and even in companies that when you see the kinds of clients we signed are having significant challenges. We saw some of those companies signing new deals that were not previously clients. So all of those combinations is how we kind of get comfortable that there's still real demand out there. Peter Appert – Goldman Sachs: Back as recently as '06 the wallet retention was in the low 90s is that sort of a benchmark that you think might be relevant in terms of thinking about the macro-environment currently?

It's a great question. We certainly think it's not out of the question that you could see a decline in the wallet retention rate. We started to see a little bit of decline in the fourth quarter from the previous trend line, so certainly we had been running kind of a 100, 101 dip to 98. So our current expectations aren't that it necessarily goes that low but that is I don't think anything that you say is completely out of the question as we think about it. However I think our guidance assumes more kind of what we saw in the fourth quarter as opposed to it significantly weakening from there.

(Operator instructions) Your next question comes from Dave Lewis – JPMorgan. Dave Lewis – JPMorgan: First question is have you seen an impact from your government contracts, any material cancellations in 4Q or thus far in this quarter? And what's the vulnerability there going forward in light of the budget crisis on the state and federal level?

We've seen no different environment for contract cancellations in Q4 than in previous periods and that applies to all industries including government sector. Dave Lewis – JPMorgan: Could you just provide a little more detail on pricing? You mentioned the 3%. Is that pretty firm? Are you getting that 3% through 4Q and how is that trending in the first quarter thus far?

So long term our strategy has been to increase prices 4% to 7% a year which is what we did in '07. Toward the end of '08 when we do our normal price increase given the macroeconomic situation we decided it made sense to have it a little bit lower. And really it's because we don't want to see, provoke an emotional reaction with clients on that. And through Q4 we didn’t see any – that kind of approach worked in the sense we didn't see a lot of push-back on the 3% price increase. Meaning that in our average research product for new products revenue was $18,000 per user. And so people don't not buy because there's a 3% price increase on the $18,000 and that's kind of the net of it. So through Q4 we didn't see a lot of push-back on that 3% as opposed to the 5% to 7% that we had done previous years. Dave Lewis – JPMorgan: I just want to be clear on the commentary with regard to the first quarter. You guys are assuming that you're seeing an environment that's similar to 4Q and your forward-looking guidance, but are the trends thus far through January are they still similar to 4Q? And the reason I'm asking is obviously trends in many other industries are worse and so that's just a concern that things could be getting worse as we speak.

Currently, two points, we're not seeing anything different. It's far too early to really tell. January is one of the smallest months of the whole year for us. But in that small volume we've seen we haven't seen anything different than we saw in the fourth quarter at this point. But I wouldn't necessarily read into that trend one way or the other because it's far too early.

(Operator instructions) Your final question comes from [Brian Murphy] – Sidoti & Company. [Brian Murphy] – Sidoti & Company: Chris, you mentioned that you stepped up the sales force headcount and sales force productivity is depressed from previous levels. At what point do you start to add to the sales force again? Would you be doing than when we have productivity returning to previous levels or would you do it ahead of that?

I'll answer that one. Basically we're thinking that – we're looking for a reasonably short payback in productivity on our sales people. So when we saw a situation where we could kind of get a breakeven in their first year, cost versus their kind of incremental profitability, what they sell, that's kind of in the first 12 to 18 months that's what we're looking for. So what's going on is, as we hire new people and their productivity is lower in their first year than after their first year. And so if we can get kind of a marginal breakeven or better in the first 12 to 18 months that's when we'll hire more people. [Brian Murphy] – Sidoti & Company: And, Gene, you mentioned that you're sticking with your sort of long-term target of growing research revenue about 15%. Would you expect to get most of that growth sort of as you have in the past by aggressively growing the sales force or would you expect to get more from productivity gains?

I'd say we expect to get both kind of equally. In other words we think we can get a lot higher productivity than we out before this economic downturn. As you know, over the past three years we improved our sales productivity every year consistently. We think that will continue after the downturn. So basically once the economy recovers we're going to be back on the track. We're on track now to get sales productivity up even in this environment. We think it will continue to go up from where it was, from the high point after the economy turns around. Having said that we'll still add headcount as well again based on the kind of economics I was just talking about. So we'll add headcount as fast as we can operationally absorb it and as fast as we can afford it. And we're still going to focus on sales productivity improvements as well, and those have not topped out by any stretch.

There are no further questions in the queue at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to management for closing remarks. Please proceed.

Although we expect 2009 to present a challenging environment for growth we remain confident in our ability to generate double digit revenue and earnings growth once the economy returns to more normal levels. We've taken decisive actions to control costs in the current environment but we're still investing in our businesses so that we're well-positioned for long-term growth once the macro-economic environment improves. The Gartner brand is in a class by itself. Our products, services and people are superior to the competition. We have a great business model and we benefit from a vast untapped market opportunity. With these great capabilities I remain very optimist about the future success of our company. Thanks for joining us today and I look forward to reviewing our results next quarter.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes our presentation. You may now disconnect. Good day.