Richard Hill
Analyst · Keith Weiss from Morgan Stanley
Well, I give my best analysis that I've had since I've been working on this data for about three weeks. I think the largest single factor affecting this downward trend is what I spoke about in my initial remarks, which is the fact that our core business, which is the Blue Coat systems, our customers are moving to the cloud more quickly, OK? And we had a weakness in our cloud solution. And as I spoke about it in my text, we, in fact, have strengthened that cloud offering, so we think we have that piece fixed. But the fact that the customer moves, we don't want to try to force the customer not to go where they want. So we're in a much better position to retain our key customers into the cloud now that we've improved the product. But the fact that our hardware business is declining more rapidly than we anticipated, that's what led to this downward position. Now having said that, we believe and we're planning that it's somewhat, we're still planning for decline but not at the rate it did decline in the last couple of quarters. So right now, that's the analysis we have of that business. I think the first thing you have to start with as a competitor versus a product and we spent a fair amount of time given how long I've been in the saddle, really, first and foremost, checking the product vitality. And I'm telling you that I feel that the vitality of the product has improved dramatically over the last six months. But again, when you fall down and you don't really realize, that's what's causing the customer to move away from you. We got to go work and we got to win those people back. We also though had really got to expand how quickly we get these products through a wider cross-section of business opportunities. I think that's extremely important. So I can't say enough about how our channel is working has to be improved. We've got to accelerate what we get across the entire channel, whether it's targeted at small business, medium business or the high-end enterprise business itself. And I think we have effective plans in place today that are going to take us there. As you can tell by our projection for Q1, that's where we wanted to be, but when we go out to year-end and we drive for those results, we will get there. So that's the best answer I can give you, Keith.