James E. Heppelmann
Analyst · Evercore Partners.
Yes, okay. Well, Matt, and I noticed you picked up coverage on the company recently, so thank you for that. Glad to have you with us. It's a very good question. Because if you look at the guidance down tick in revenue, you're exactly right. There was a chunk that's related to currency, and then there's a big chunk that's related to services. And what I would say is the overall body of services demand is down a bit naturally because license sales have been softer of late. That said, our services partners are growing quickly, and there would be a theoretical opportunity for us to claw back some of the revenue they're taking if our objective was to grow our own services revenue. We think that would be short-term thinking, because in the long term, we want the service economy to continue to grow. And the success they're having is actually pretty important to where we're trying to go in the longer run, and we don't really care to disrupt that to claw back some of that revenue, that while it boosts our revenue number, it isn't that helpful, quite frankly, to our profitability story. So just to put this in perspective, when we began this partner program more aggressively, I don't know, a year or 2 ago, at the time we said that we want our partners to move from doing roughly 20% of the deployment work and we're doing 80% to get to a balance more like 50-50 over a 4, let's say, year period. Well, this year, they'll do about 30%. So the growth rate for our partners to go from -- a partner ecosystem to go from doing 20% to 30%, they need 50% growth. So their growth rates are high and our growth rates are low, and we're resisting the temptation to try to disrupt some of their growth to drive some of our growth because that's not really our strategy. So that's a good chunk of the take down, and it's a take down that, that particular piece, we don't feel bad about.