Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Gartner's Earnings Conference Call for the Fourth Quarter and Full year 2016. A replay of this call will be available through March 4, 2017. The replay can be accessed by dialing 888-286-8010 for domestic calls and 617-801-6888 for international calls by entering the pass code 31206649. This call is being simultaneously webcast, and will be archived on Gartner's website at www.gartner.com for approximately 30 days. I will now turn the conference over to Sherief Bakr, Gartner's Group Vice President of Investor Relations, for opening remarks and introductions. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Dave, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Gartner's fourth quarter and full year 2016 earnings call. With me today in Stanford is our Chief Executive Officer, Gene Hall; and our Chief Financial Officer, Craig Safian. * This call will include a discussion of Q4 and full year 2016 financial results as disclosed in today's press release. We will also discuss our preliminary outlook for 2017. After our prepared remarks, you'll have an opportunity to ask questions. I'd like to remind everyone that the press release is available on our website, investor.gartner.com. Now, before we begin, I'd like to remind you that certain statements made in this call may constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements can vary materially from actual results and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those contained in the company's 2015 Annual Report on Form 10-K and 2016 Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, as well as in other filings with the SEC. I would encourage all of you to review these risk factors listed in these documents. Now with that, I'd like to hand the call over to Gartner's Chief Executive Officer, Gene Hall. Gene?

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We delivered another great year in 2016. We told you we would accelerate and we did. We delivered against our key metrics for the year, including double-digit growth in contract value, revenue and earnings per share. In addition, as many of you know, we recently announced our intent to acquire CEB. I'm incredibly excited about our business, our prospects for growth and our strategy to drive long-term growth and value for our shareholders. As in the past, I will give you a high level overview of our results on an FX neutral basis, since that's the best way to understand the underlying performance of our business. For the full year 2016 contract value was up 14%. Total company revenues were also up 14% and EBITDA was up 10%. This performance was driven by robust quarter-over-quarter results and demand for our services remained strong. Our results reflect a tremendous value delivered to our clients and all of this occurred against the challenging global economic environment that we had throughout 2016. Research is our largest and most profitable segment and this business is firing on all cylinders. For the fourth quarter of 2016, we had double-digit growth in every geography, every size client and virtually every industry. Research revenues grew 15% and total contract value grew 14%. Client retention was 84% and wallet retention 104%, which were near our all-time highs. Both client and wallet retention improved sequentially over Q3 2016. Sales productivity improved as well. Rolling four-quarter productivity improved sequentially to 7% over Q3. And our standalone Q4 2016 sales productivity increased by 12% over Q4 of 2015. And we are not stopping there. Our number one priority is continuing to drive higher sales productivity. Our Events business delivers great value to our…

Thank you, Gene, and good morning, everyone. 2016 was yet another strong year for Gartner. The combination of the tremendous value we provide to our clients around the world, the investments we are making to capture our vast market opportunity, our focus on strong operational execution, and our exceptional business model saw us continue our trend of delivering double-digit growth with strong free cash flow conversion. On an FX neutral basis, our year-over-year financial performance for the full year 2016 included total company revenue growth of 14%, Research revenue growth of 17%, normalized EBITDA growth of 10%, and diluted earnings per share excluding acquisition adjustments of $2.96 per share or 24% growth. Our exceptional business model continues to create a consistently high level of free cash flow conversion. On a rolling four-quarter basis, our free cash flow conversion was 140% of normalized net income. We also continued to utilize our balance sheet to drive long-term value for our shareholders via a mixture of acquisitions and share repurchases. As you know, in early January we announced our agreement to acquire CEB, an acquisition that we expect to deliver significant value to our shareholders over both the short and long term. We continue to see robust demand for our services across the globe. During the fourth quarter, we saw an acceleration in our contract value growth along with sequential improvements in our retention metrics and sales productivity. And as our 2017 outlook demonstrates, we expect to deliver another year of double-digit revenue and EBITDA growth with strong cash flow generation. On an FX neutral basis, our year-over-year financial performance for the fourth quarter of 2016 included, contract value growth of 14% and Research revenue growth of 15%, Events revenue growth of 2% on a same-event basis, Consulting revenue growth of 1%, normalized…

So, as Craig said, I'll turn now to our recent announcement to acquire CEB. Yesterday, we received U.S. antitrust approval for the proposed transaction, which is an important milestone in completing the acquisition. This transaction has multiple compelling shareholder value drivers. First, this is a highly complementary combination. The Gartner brand is known for delivering independent objective insights for syndicated research and advisory products to all levels of IT, supply chain and marketing professionals. CEB is widely admired for delivering best practice and talent management insights to executives and other functions such as HR, sales, finance and legal. Together, we create the leading global research and advisory company serving all major functions in enterprise. In today's world, every functional area of the business is undergoing dynamic change comparable to what's been happening in IT over the past decade. Much of this is in fact driven by increased technology capabilities. Take HR for example. Today's Chief HR Officer relies on sophisticated analytics around hiring. They're increasingly using artificial intelligence and machine learning. They also have a rapidly changing regulatory environment they need to keep abreast of. The advent of cloud computing has enabled new types of HR tools, such as Workday, a core HR platform, Avature, which supports candidate CRM or Cornerstone, a talent management system that addresses workforce learning and development. Just like IT leaders, HR leaders need help in selecting the right tools in today's rapidly changing environment. These are mission critical priorities for every enterprise and they must be addressed whether companies growing or in financial distress. Our services will be just as critical for HR leaders as they have been for IT leaders. The same is true in finance, as Craig can tell you. And it's true for the other major functions of the business such as…

Thank you. And please standby for your first question, which comes from the line of Anj Singh at Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Anjaneya K. Singh - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC: Hi. Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to touch on the Events business. I know you had spoken to the three specific events on your Q3 call, and you called out the promotions related turnover on this call. But it seems things worsened from the early November update that you had beyond what you were expecting. Did the timing of the promotions particularly impact Q4 or was the performance there a bit softer as well?

So, great question. It's Gene. The timing of promotions actually disproportionately affected Q4. As you know, Q4 is our largest Events quarter, and as we look at sales of tickets and exhibitor sales, it ramps up kind of exponentially into the quarter. And so, the fact that we had some open territories, as I mentioned from these promotions, and by the way, these promotions are great for our people in long-term and other parts of Gartner would gave us the short-term problem at Events. And so, it was really the timing of them. It just is kind of you have this exponential ramp up into our biggest Events quarter. Anjaneya K. Singh - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC: Okay. Understood. That makes sense. And then moving on to number of enterprises, you guys have been growing that figure in the sort of 6% to 8% range over time, and ahead of that I think in the past two years. That number trailed off to about 3%-ish in the quarter. Could you provide some updated thoughts and color on that deceleration? Wondering, what are the potential offsets? I realized you had average enterprise spend tick up nicely in the quarter as an offset, but just wondering, if you can share any go-forward thoughts.

Yes. Sure. Good morning Anj. As we've discussed all the time as we've talked about our market opportunity, we have strong conviction in the fact that we have an enormous market opportunity in all of the enterprises that currently don't do business with us and we have an enormous market opportunity even in our existing enterprises. And the continued expansion, the average spend for enterprise illustrates that the fact that there is that huge opportunity in growing our penetration within existing enterprises. In terms of the enterprise count, I would just refer you, we had a slight dip in client retention over the course of the year, which you saw come back in the fourth quarter. That's going to impact that net enterprise number a little bit. I wouldn't read too much into it. We drove really nice new business growth over the course of the year, and we did accelerate our CV growth rate over the course of the year up to 14% as well. And so as we go forward, we again, expect to see about what we have seen historically which is about two-thirds of our growth come from further penetration of existing enterprises and about one-third of our growth come from net new logos. Anjaneya K. Singh - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC: Okay. Great. That's helpful. And one last one from me, just wanted to get your thoughts on the sales environment post-elections in the U.S. I realize there's still a lot of noise and uncertainty, but you guys have been speaking about it being a difficult environment in 2016. So just wondering if you have any updated thoughts as it relates to your domestic business and internationally post-election? Thanks.

Yeah. It's Gene. So as we mentioned in our last call, we saw kind of an inflection point in our business and that continues. So the business environment got noticeably better, which sort of helped drive a strong Q4. That environment continues to be the same and I'd say both in the U.S. and globally. Anjaneya K. Singh - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC: Perfect. Thanks a lot.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Gary Bisbee at RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Good morning. Let me start off with another question on the Events business. I understand all the explanations you provided. But can you give us an update as we think about the Symposium, the key events, how many of those are sold out? I know the North America one has been for a couple of years and is that a gating factor to growth as we think about the ability to continue to grow this going forward? And the second part of that is just, what actually gives you confidence that I think, Gene, you said or Craig said that tenure is improved heading into 2017 of the sales force there? Thank you.

So, it's Gene. So first, in terms of sold out the – we have as you mentioned in a couple of our events like Orlando Symposium, we are kind of at capacity. We're solving that problem a couple of different ways. One is, we're increasing the number of CIOs that are going to Orlando Symposium and we're increasing ticket prices to match the fact that we have a richer audience going there as well. And so that's one mechanism of growth. The second mechanism of growth is, we are introducing – if you look in the North America, we're introducing other events that we can take even CIOs to beyond Symposium where there might be capacity. So for example, we had a Canadian event that is very much like a symposium that over time in fact could become a symposium where we have two in North America, not just one, so that our Canadian clients would tend more to go to that event and the North American ones. Similar for Latin America, we have an event today in Brazil for the people in Latin America that use to come to Orlando Symposium, they can now come to our Brazil Symposium. And so part of our strategy is we'll introduce additional symposiums over time, just as we've done in the past. And so, we're not constrained in growth. We're looking to introduce new comparable events that are tailored for – that are more tailored actually to a specific audience like the Canadian one I mentioned. So, we're not really constrained in any way by our Events team.

And Gary, on the second part of your question, in terms of the tenure. Two things working in our favor that actually give us positive view on the outlook for Events. So number one is, we have more sales people in territory entering 2017 as compared to where we were at the same point in 2016, and we'll also get the benefit of – we hired them over the course of 2016, and so their tenure mix or seasoning will have improved as well. And as we've talked about in the past, obviously, people in their first year are not as productive as people in their second year, or not as productive as people in their third year. So the outlook for Events is really based on the fact that fuller territories, essentially a bigger army selling events and the improvement in tenure mix.

And lastly I'd say, as we looked at the ramp up of our new sales people, that we did hire in 2016, on what they sold toward the end of 2016, which affects 2017 events not 2016 events, they're right on track for having very good productivity.

Great, thanks. And then just a follow-up on CEB. What would be a reasonable timeline to have some of the improvements like the retention stuff you laid out and/or better growth in training and management of the sales force? I mean, should we expect that this a several year project? Or is some of that stuff potentially a little more quick-hit opportunities than that? Thank you.

So we think of the opportunity as being sort of short term, medium term, longer term. So there's opportunities in all categories. We're going to prioritize the things that have short term pay off first, make sure we get those nailed very quickly. So we think that we'll see pretty quick improvements in CEB's retention and other kind of factors as we implement these things that have the nearest term impact first. And then to your point, there will other things that take longer to do, but there are definitely things that have a short-term impact.

Thank you.

Thank you. Next question is from the line of Tim McHugh at William Blair. Please go ahead. Tim J. McHugh - William Blair & Co. LLC: Yes, thanks. Just on the Research contract value growth, the acceleration, can you give us any more color? Was this some of the weaker areas that grew slower earlier in 2016 improved? Or I guess what – anything that stood out in terms of geographic or industry improvement versus what you saw early in year?

Yeah. Good morning, Tim. It's Craig. The improvement we saw was broad based. As we mentioned on prior calls, we have seen a rebound in Brazil. We have seen a rebound in the energy and utility sectors, which were probably the two areas – and also in the Middle East as well, which were probably the three areas that were the biggest hit. That alone does not account for the acceleration in CV growth. We actually saw a nice improvement in the Americas, nice improvement in Europe, nice improvement in Asia and Australia as well. So it really was a combination of improvement in some of the areas that were most impacted. But also a broad-based improvement as well, which ties into the inflection point comment that Gene gave, both on last quarter's call and on this quarter's call. Tim J. McHugh - William Blair & Co. LLC: Right. Okay. And organically I guess does – you've got SCM and then Machina during the quarter. What was the contribution I guess in terms of contract value?

Yes, it was small impact, less than 1 point on the overall growth rate. Important note, SCM World was in last quarter. So the sequential improvement is actually full-on organic sequential improvement. Tim J. McHugh - William Blair & Co. LLC: Other than Machina? Or is that not...

Yeah, Machina is very, very small, yes, very small. Tim J. McHugh - William Blair & Co. LLC: Okay. All right. And then lastly, I guess the Consulting business, as we think about the contribution margin from that business going forward, it's kind of multi-year trend kind of down, as you've built out the managing director program. I get the strategy behind it. But at what point would you expect that to level off? And could it improve again? I guess how do you think about the economics of that strategy, as we think about that part of the business going forward?

Sure, Tim. You're right in that investment in managing partners is a core pillar of our Consulting strategy. Ultimately over the long term what it will do when we get to full coverage is drive deeper, longer lasting recurring relationships that make the business more predictable, that make our utilization more predictable and at higher levels. That's ultimately the strategy. And as you mentioned, we've been growing the capacity to get there. As we look ahead, we're going to continue to invest in managing partners. We do believe that over the long term that will result in the things I just mentioned, which are more stable revenue growth, more stable utilization. And so we would expect to see margin improvements or more attractive margins for this business over the long term. Tim J. McHugh - William Blair & Co. LLC: Okay, great. Thanks.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Manav Patnaik at Barclays. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, gentlemen. The first question was just on the Events promotions issue, I mean, I guess, we all know Q4 is your big Events quarter. So was there any reason why these promotions could not have been delayed into the next year? And then just tied to that, I guess, you moved these guys into management, so the productivity stepped down. Just how do you manage those same issues when you do the same thing with CEB? Like presumably, some of your senior sales people will be helping you out improve CEB's growth. And so how do you prevent that from hitting your productivity on Research as well?

So on the timing of the promotions, the – I'll tell you the philosophy we've had, which is particularly for our high-performing people, they can apply for jobs inside Gartner or outside Gartner. And they can do this whenever they want to do it. And of course, if we have high performers, we really want to retain those people. And so we've adopted a policy that we want to be competitive with outside jobs. And so the concern we have is if we say, well, you can't change jobs and get this great promotion where you'll make more money and have a better job and advance your career, because it's not integral (52:20) to the company, we're concerned – and this was what a lot of companies have, is that then drives them to take jobs on the outside. And so while we do try to work with people for timing, but people want to advance their careers and increase their compensation, et cetera. And so it's a fine balance there. I also do think – again this was kind of a very unusual happening where we had unusually low turnover for like the last three years among these teams. And then this just – again, they applied to different jobs regardless. It wasn't like they all went to one place, different kind of jobs. And it just all happened to hit at a time that was not the best for our Q4 events. In terms of CEB, I don't see a similar kind of thing happening. Again we're going to work with identifying and increasing – first, as we mentioned, having improvements in retention programs. If we think – there really it's just about executing the programs, implementing the tools that we've developed over the last decade at Gartner. And then we'll accelerate hiring of new sales people. And that'll be about building a recruiting capability, a training capability and then deploying these new sales people in CEB's organization.

Okay. And then the Events consolidation from three to one, which underperformed, I mean, was that just a factor of confusion with your clients? Is there anything to read in terms of travel budgets and so forth? I guess you're increasing the number of events in 2017 as well, so maybe not. But just some thoughts there.

Yeah. So it had nothing to do with travel budgets. We had three events that were application oriented. And they had a clear value proposition for both our attendees and our exhibitors. When we combined them into one, we didn't do a good job of communicating what that new value proposition was, and it's kind of as simple as that, it has nothing to do with travel or anything like that. We've analyzed it in detail. We understand what happened there. But otherwise I should mention, larger events have bigger economics and better economics. And so in general, they're better for us. In this particular case that tried to move from three to one, which looked great on paper. We communicated it ineffectively in terms of – to both our exhibitors and our attendees and didn't had the result we would have liked.

Okay. And then just last question for Craig. I think typically you always start the year with sort of a wide range of guidance especially on EBITDA and free cash flow. But any particular moving pieces that you would call out that would take us either to the low end or high end of that?

Good morning, Manav. The range we give, again, we are talking about a roughly $500 million base. So the range from our perspective isn't that enormous. It's the typical range of outcomes. If we see Events performance or Consulting performance being towards the top end of their range, obviously that drives profits to the top end of range. If we have accelerated CV growth earlier in the year, that obviously can flow through and impact the earnings as well. So, it's really no change in philosophy in terms of the size of the range and no terms in philosophy in terms of the puts and takes to our overall guidance.

Okay. Got it. Thanks a lot guys.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Jeff Meuler at Robert W. Baird & Co. Please go ahead. Jeff P. Meuler - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Yeah. Thanks. Can you comment on the sales force productivity by tenure? What I am wondering is, are you seeing broad-based improvement both for the new hires and the more established people? Or is there one of those groups that is in particular driving the improvement?

Actually, great question, Jeff. So, there's actually really good news here, which is the group that had the best improvement productivity is our newest hires. And we focused on making sure we hire people with the right fits, that we give them world-class training and we give them tools and get them off to a fast start and that's just really working. And so the single biggest tenured group that had improvement is in people earlier in their tenure. Jeff P. Meuler - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Okay. And then I understand maybe a guidance assumption, but any reason for the assumption of flat productivity and 13% head count growth in the guidance just wondering why not accelerate the head count growth a bit more or why not assume a higher productivity just based upon the breadth of the improvement that you are seeing?

Good morning, Jeff. In terms of the head count growth, as we have talked, we do a bottoms up planning exercise around all the territory growth we want to do at any given year. And when we did the bottoms up this year, again, we want to go faster in places that have really nice productivity that is accelerating, and we go a little bit slower in places that are having challenges. And when we did that math or did all of that analysis, from a territory expansion perspective, it netted out to 13%. As always, as we go through the year, if we are seeing productivity continue to accelerate and improve, we will go a little bit faster. If we see places where we are challenged, we will go a little bit slower in those places. But our overarching planning assumption as we rolled it up from the bottom netted out to about 13% territory growth and that's what we baked into the plan. In terms of the productivity assumption, Jeff you know from a planning perspective we typically – we don't plan with a hockey stick. We don't plan based on hope. We plan based on what we've actually achieved. And so from our perspective, the way to actually build the plan is, we build it based on flat productivity. As you know, if we deliver flat productivity, that's not what we're aiming for. We're aiming for consistent improvements in productivity, but from a planning perspective we always find it most prudent to go with our most recent performance. Jeff P. Meuler - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Makes sense. Thank you.

Thank you. We now have a question from the line of Jeff Silber at BMO Capital Markets.

Thanks so much. Just wanted to switch quickly to the proposed CED acquisition. Can you just remind us what the milestones are going forward that we need to follow before closing?

Sure. Good morning, Jeff. So a couple of things so, number one, as you see in the press release, and as Gene mentioned in his prepared remarks, clearing HSR is obviously a big milestone and we cleared that had yesterday, which is great. We're looking to file the S-4 and Proxy in the next couple of days. That will be for 9/30/2016 and for full year 2015, both companies will be filing their 10-Ks towards the end of this month. We will then very quickly follow up with a updated S-4 and Proxy that is pro forma combined 2016 results. We're in the process of working through our financing and we will be lining all that up with the milestones you should be looking at or obviously HSR clearance which we just got through the required regulatory filings and then we will be out marketing our financing instruments in March. Again, we're targeting, we said first half of 2017 close. Ideally, that happens sometime in April, but you never know what bumps could be there from a filing or regulatory perspective, but we're on track to close as quickly as we can, and the hurdles are really around the regulatory filings and then getting out and marketing the financing.

Great. And just one clarification, the S-4 that you file over the next few days with the September 30 information, you'll have pro forma information in there as well?

There will be pro forma combined financials for nine months ended 9/30/2016 and full year 2015.

All right. Fantastic. Thanks so much.

Thank you. There are no further questions. So I would now like to turn the call back to Mr. Gene Hall for closing remarks.

Well, thank you for your questions. So, to summarize the key points of today's call, we're performing extraordinarily well as a company. For the full year 2016, we delivered double-digit growth in every geography, across every size company and in virtually every industry. Our sustained success demonstrates the tremendous value we deliver for our clients, whether thriving or in economic distress. We recently announced we've entered into an agreement to acquire CEB. CEB is highly complementary to Gartner and we're confident that our combined services will be critical for every function of the business just like they have been for IT. Additionally, this transaction is attractive for both the short and long-term. It's immediately accretive to Gartner's adjusted EPS and we expect to be double-digit percent accretive to our adjusted EPS in 2018. We're getting better, stronger, faster day-after-day, year-after-year. We're entering 2017 with incredible momentum and we expect to continue our trend of double-digit growth for years to come. We look forward to updating you again at our next earnings call. Thanks for joining us today.

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