Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Gartner Inc.’s earnings conference call for the first quarter of 2009. (Operator Instructions) I will now turn the conference over to Hank Diamond, Group Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance for opening remarks and introductions. Please go ahead, 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 expression 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 first call 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 statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on current expectations in 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 2008. 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 highlights of our first quarter 2009 financial results. Starting with earnings, EPS from continuing operations increased 50% year over year to $0.21, net income was $20 million, and normalized EBITDA increased 20% year over year to $48.3 million. At March 31, 2009, contract value, which is a key leading indicator for Gartner's research business, was $760.7 million. Excluding the impact of foreign exchange, contract value increased 2% year over year. Revenue increased 1% year over year excluding the impact of foreign exchange and was $273.5 million for the first quarter. Cash from operations increased 4% year over year to $14.8 million and capital expenditures were $4.5 million. Finally, on the balance sheet, as of March 31, 2009, the company had total debt of $338 million and cash of $70.3 million. In addition to announcing first quarter earnings, we raised the low end of our full year 2009 guidance for EPS from continuing operations in normalized EBITDA and we reiterated our guidance for revenue and cash flow from operations. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Gartner's Chief Executive Officer, Gene Hall.

Thanks, Hank. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. There are four key points that I would like you all to take away from our call today. First, our results last quarter continue to demonstrate the value our research provides in supporting the critical need to run effective and cost efficient IT operations and programs. As a result, we are well-positioned to succeed in both good economies and bad. Second, we are effectively executing a strategy to both control expenses and maximize profitability during the current downturn, while at the same time positioning the company for long-term growth. Third, our businesses are performing well. Revenue trends are in line with our expectations and our focus on controlling costs allowed us to generate substantial earnings growth and solid cash flow in the first quarter. And fourth, we are well-positioned to quickly return to double-digit revenue and earnings growth as the global economy returns to more normal activity levels and we remain confident in our long-term outlook. Now let me now address each of these points in more detail. Starting with point one, Gartner's well-positioned to succeed in the current economic environment. Our three businesses -- research, consulting, and events -- have strong synergies with a clear focus on IT cost optimization and effectiveness. This portfolio of products provides a comprehensive suite of offerings that support critical operational and strategic decisions that IT leaders must make to run effective and cost-efficient IT programs. Our research provides our clients with tremendous value at relatively small cost and in fact is often self-funding. Our size and scale is a significant competitive advantage at a time when companies are scrutinizing every expense to ensure that value is being delivered. With almost 1,200 analysts and consultants, we continue to demonstrate that our research offerings are differentiated…

Thanks, Gene and good morning, everyone. Our first quarter results demonstrate that we are taking the actions necessary to deliver strong results during a challenging economic environment. During the first quarter, total revenue increased 1% year over year on an FX neutral basis, driven by the 4% increase in our research segment. This revenue growth, coupled with tight cost controls and continued efforts to improve operational efficiency, enabled us to increase income from continuing operations by over 35%, expand profit margins, and generate solid cash flow. The execution of our share repurchase program over the past year resulted in a 6% reduction in the fully diluted share count and contributed to a 50% increase in EPS from continuing operations over last year. Our Q1 EPS is better than the estimated quarterly phasing we provided at investor day due to better than expected revenue in our consulting segment and lower expenses across the company resulting from our tight cost controls. With these first quarter results, we have increased the low end of our EBITDA and EPS guidance and now expect full year normalized EBITDA to be between $170 million and $200 million and EPS from continuing operations to be between $0.66 and $0.87. Let me now discuss each of our three business segments in more detail. In research, revenue growth was 4% year over year on an FX neutral basis during the first quarter. This growth, coupled with the operating leverage in the business and tight cost controls, delivered a gross margin increase of three percentage points to 66%. The research segment accounted for almost 70% of our total revenue in Q1, up from 66% in Q1 2008. Given the high margins and strong cash flow profile of the research business, we have focused on growing this segment and increasing it…

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Peter Appert with Piper Jaffray. Peter P. Appert - Piper Jaffray & Co.: Good morning. Thanks. Chris and Gene, the margin performance is certainly particularly impressive and I am wondering -- I guess this is for Chris -- how much does it cost do you think could come back as the revenue growth improves? How much is permanent reduction? And I guess the real question is does this make you feel perhaps a little more optimistically about the potential margin target over the next couple of years?

So a couple of things -- I think in order to understand that, you have to look at each of the three segments separately. So for example, in consulting, we are managing very tightly the resources in consulting to match the demand, so as we see backlog improve over time, we’ll match the resources with that backlog and visa versa as we’ve said earlier, if the backlog declined, we would adjust our resources appropriately. On the event side, it is a function again of the number of events we decide to hold and the attendees at the events. There are certainly some variable costs related to who attends the events and on the flip side, we also have a lot of fixed costs. So once you decide to have an event, all the venue costs are fixed, so there’s some leverage there on the upside as we continue to grow there. On the research side, I think what you’ve seen over time is that business has a significant amount of operating leverage inherent to the business, and so -- in fact, probably for the past three or four years, we’ve been relatively flat in terms of the research analyst base, and so I think we’ve done a really good job of finding ways to leverage and improve the productivity of our analysts and drive that. So that’s kind of each of the three segments. I think when you look at some of the G&A and other costs, I think some of the costs we’ve taken out are clearly things that don’t have to return. We are being very focused on things that improve our operational effectiveness and so we feel pretty good that some of the costs that we have taken out are things that can remain out of the cost structure. In terms of our longer term, which is the last part of your question, as we’ve said many times, we’ve been driving towards an EBITDA, or a normalized EBITDA margin of about 20% and driving into that range, we still feel very comfortable over the long-term that that’s very achievable. In fact, as you’ve mentioned, some of the cost actions we are taking certainly are things that we feel will help us get there over time. So all in all, I think we still feel very good about that expectation. Peter P. Appert - Piper Jaffray & Co.: Okay, great. Thank you. And then Gene, I think you mentioned some initiatives to drive retention rate improvement. Can you dig into that a little further?

Peter, basically in terms of retention, we are very focused on it and we have both initiatives with our sales force and with our service people, and with our analysts to focus on retention. And the thing that is most important in terms of retaining our clients is really making sure that they use the services that they get the most value out of. So we are really focusing all three of the segments I mentioned -- the sales force, our analysts, and our service people, on making sure that clients are aware of and utilize the things that are most important to them. An example is we have a number of ways to help clients save costs in their IT operations and actually through their business, and not all clients may be aware of that and so we are making sure that clients are aware of those services and utilize them. When they -- we know that when they utilize those things, our renewal rates are very high. So that’s the essence of it. Peter P. Appert - Piper Jaffray & Co.: Okay, so not necessarily changes in the [inaudible] structure or the pricing?

No, we’re not seeing -- with pricing, we are seeing very stable. We don’t see any issues with pricing at all and feel like our account structure is working fine as well. It’s really making sure -- we have a vast array of services and it is making sure that we match what clients have the most value to the services that we have and that they are aware of it. And again, because there is such a vast array, they are not always aware of it and so we are getting I think much better at making sure clients get connected to the services they get the most value out of. Peter P. Appert - Piper Jaffray & Co.: Got it. And I know you haven’t felt this to be a significant issue in the past, but I am just wondering in the context of the macro environment, I’ve got to think some of the competitors are more aggressive from a pricing standpoint. Do you hear back anything from the sales force on that?

Again, our pricing has been very stable. We don’t see any issues with pricing at all. Peter P. Appert - Piper Jaffray & Co.: Right, okay. And then the last thing, Gene, I see that Tim Noble is departing as head of sales. And I am -- you know, he’s been there a while. I’m just wondering how disruptive to the sales organization that change is.

That’s a great question. It’s not disruptive at all. Tim’s departure was not a surprise to us. I mean, Tim’s been a terrific sales leader with us over the past three years and built a great organization. But he lives in London and as you know, we are headquartered in Stanford, Connecticut. He has two young children and he is -- you know, he was leading a global sales organization and the travel being based in London and running a global sales organization took him away from home a lot, and so he has opted to take a job that has very limited travel. In his new job, he will only have responsibility for the U.K. and Ireland, so it won’t be global at all, and so he will have a lot less travel. We knew that this a -- we weren’t surprised with this at all and we have good succession planning in Gartner. In sales, we are -- as you know, we focused on building our sales team over the last four years. We have a great sales team with a very deep bench and we have actually a cadre of successors. The new person we have is a lady named Diane Julian who is going to take over from Tim. She has been at Gartner for 19 years, so she understand Gartner extremely well. She has held a series of increasingly significant leadership roles over time. She has a great team record. She has a fabulous record of success and it will be a very smooth transition. You know, she and the whole sales team -- and the rest of the sales team is stable, and so we’ve got a deep bench, a new leader who was part of our succession planning, and is a very -- in a very orderly way and she has a great track record. Peter P. Appert - Piper Jaffray & Co.: Thanks, Gene. Let me just sneak one other thing in -- what was the sales count at the end of the quarter, and still looking to hold that flat through the year?

Yeah, Peter the sales, the quarter bearing sales headcount was 930. It ended last year at 928, so essentially flat. What we said we were going to do throughout this year is maintain the current number of territories we have, so there are a few open positions, so if we do a good job of retaining, that number might go up a little bit but net of it is it is going to stay relatively flat for the year. At this point, our expectation would be that as we start to see sales productivity improve back to the levels that we had been experiencing prior to the downturn, that’s when we would start to ramp up the sales organization again. Peter P. Appert - Piper Jaffray & Co.: Thanks very much.

Our next question comes from the line of William Sutherland with Boenning & Scattergood. William Sutherland - Boenning & Scattergood: Good morning and thanks for taking the questions. Chris, do you have a deferred revenue number at 331? I don’t have a balance sheet in my press release.

Deferred revenue ended the first quarter at $374 million. William Sutherland - Boenning & Scattergood: Okay. Thank you.

And did you indicate that you -- I know that you directed a lot of the positive cash flow to debt reduction in Q1. Do you think that’s kind of the program for the rest of the year, primarily? William Sutherland - Boenning & Scattergood: Well, what we did in the first quarter, as you rightly pointed out, we did use about $70 million to pay down a part of the revolver. We have about $50 million outstanding on the revolver and total debt I think outstanding of about $338 million at this point. For the balance of the year, we do have some scheduled payments on the term portion. I think that’s about $50 million for the remainder of the year so some portion of our cash will go towards our normal term payments. We have been, as we mentioned earlier, very thoughtful and careful about managing our balance sheet and liquidity position in light of the uncertainty, both in the economic environment and the credit markets. But we still do believe that share repurchases are an attractive use of our cash over the longer term and as we start to feel more comfortable both with the environment and the credit markets, we’ll make some decisions as to when to resume under that program and be more aggressive in repurchasing shares. William Sutherland - Boenning & Scattergood: Thanks. Gene, how do you -- as you look at the potential acquisition marketplace, any thoughts on that for us at this point?

Great question. So we have a business development group. We look at acquisitions all the time and it’s an important part of our strategy but I can’t really comment on any specific targets or timing. William Sutherland - Boenning & Scattergood: But does the -- does it feel like it’s more constructive kind of environment to be looking in at this point, or is it not anymore interesting?

I think it is a constructive time to be looking. William Sutherland - Boenning & Scattergood: Okay, good. Thank you, all.

Our next question comes from the line of David Lewis with JP Morgan.

Good morning, guys. I just wanted to see if you could talk about the sales pipeline. It sounds like from your comments, you guys have described the sales feedback as optimistic and is it fair to say that the pipeline, I know it’s [inaudible] during 4Q, it’s recovered in Q1 and it’s better than what you perhaps thought at the end of Q4?

I guess I would characterize it as being kind of in line with our expectations, the sales pipeline. And again -- actually, the pipeline is in line with our expectations and the -- as I said earlier, I met with sales people around the world over the last three weeks and their level of optimism about the marketplace is more positive than it’s been in months -- definitely an up-tick trend there.

Okay, great. Thanks. And the second question, the growth in IT Leaders and business leaders has been tremendous. Can you just give us a sense for where that is coming from, primarily? Is it coming more from new clients or is it existing clients? And is the pricing different between the two of them that’s perhaps driving that?

So basically the growth in those -- both those products is from both new and existing clients and it’s kind of proportional to the amount of overall growth we get from those two different segments, so it’s not just one or the other. The pricing on those products is -- you know, we have a policy on those products that every client pays the same amount. So we have legacy products where people bought over the last 10 or 15 years even where pricing is not all the same, necessarily. On all the new products and sales to new clients even of the old products, we have constant pricing so it’s the same for everybody. It’s just kind of a fair market for all of our clients there. But the growth rate is not being driven by any price differences or something like that. It’s being driven by we’re selling new clients on these products, or new individuals in existing clients.

Okay, that’s great. Thanks, guys.

Our next question comes from the line of Brian Murphy with Sidoti & Company. Brian Murphy - Sidoti & Company: Thanks for taking my question. Chris, I may have missed this, but could you just remind us what was in the other revenue line and why it makes sense to include that on the research revenue line now?

Sure. The other revenue line, if you’ve been paying attention, one of the things we’ve done over the last few years is kind of rationalized our -- some of our other products, which kind of didn’t fit neatly into our three segments. We’ve reduced those over time. The other segment this year, the revenue line was expected to be somewhere in the $7 million range for the full year, which had come down consistently. The only thing that really remained in that segment was reprints of research notes, which some clients like to buy and distribute, and so as a result of looking at that, looking at how immaterial it had become to the overall segment reporting and that it was focused on research reprints, we decided to consolidate it into the research segment. Brian Murphy - Sidoti & Company: That makes sense. Chris, also, deferred revenue, down about 17% year over year -- how much of that was FX and how do we think about the decline in deferred revenue relative to the 3% to 6% decline in research revenue implied by your guidance for the balance of the year?

The first thing is that the deferred revenue includes all three segments, so if you look at each segment separately, first consulting with a 25% decline in backlog, you would expect a corresponding and possibly more decline in the deferred because there is some lumpiness in deferred as we had bookings come in and out at different times during the quarters. Events -- obviously we didn’t have or, as I mentioned earlier, not going to have a spring symposium where we would have had at the end of Q1 of ’08 a pretty significant deferred revenue balance related to that both on the attendees that were going to attend as well as the exhibitor, so that was another significant portion of the decline. Foreign exchange had a pretty significant impact -- if you think about the foreign exchange impact on total revenues, it was pretty sizable and that similar impact also affected the deferred revenue, so when you add all those pieces together, you can kind of understand why the deferred revenue balance trended the way it did in the quarter. Brian Murphy - Sidoti & Company: Got it. That’s very helpful. Just one more -- Chris, could you just give us some color on sort of the difference between the modest decline in client retention and the sharper decline in wallet retention? I mean, are clients maybe scaling down their research consumption there, or is there less sort of up-sell? Just any color would be helpful, and that’s it for me, thanks.

Basically what’s going on there is we are seeing clients stay with us but where they have had, you know, for example, lay-offs if they have laid off a bunch of people in their organizations that used to be seat holders, they don’t keep those seats. And so what we are really seeing is that clients stay with us but where they have had dislocations and things like that, they are cutting back. And so that’s really the difference. There’s a bit of a reduction for the same reason in new business to existing clients as well, and so it’s the combination of those two factors. The clients see their value in our services so they stay with us but if they have fewer people that would have been using our services, then obviously they don’t keep those things in place.

Our next question comes from the line of Laura Lederman with William Blair.

Thank you for taking my question and nice job in a very difficult environment. Following up on the pricing question, you mentioned that the pricing is holding up. Can you talk a little bit about competitive actions and are they pricing more? And separately, are customers coming to you saying will you give us a better price and you simply say no? And have customers walked from that? So just a little bit more around the pricing environment.

Basically we’ve not seen, anymore than any other time, clients coming and saying we are going to leave if you don’t reduce our price, or whatever. I mean, we always have a very minor level of noise on that stuff but at the end of the day, people don’t decide to buy our services or not buy our services because again, our average price is $18,000 for research, as an example, per user. And so if it’s $19,000 versus $18,000 versus $17,000 is not the swing factor -- it’s how much value they get out of the services. And our services are highly differentiated from competitive offerings and clients understand that they are very different offerings. And so we don’t really -- again, at a very tiny level, we might get once in a while someone coming back with something like that but it’s not any different than in the past.

Following up on the pricing, what about pricing actions of others, or is the market, since there’s not that many players -- you, AMR, Jupiter, Forester -- what are you seeing in general out of the competition?

Again, our services are pretty highly differentiated and so the -- we are sort of focused on the deals we are doing and haven’t seen that as an issue.

Okay. Moving on, you mentioned that -- or Chris mentioned that this is a better time for acquisitions. Have pricings come down materially or potential acquisition targets still expecting prices that don’t make any sense and haven’t reflected the change in the environment?

Well, public company prices have come down quite a bit and --

That’s true. I meant the private, yeah.

Yeah, the private, I think it’s a whole mix of people. People, it depends on the individual target and different companies have different expectations and different, frankly, levels of need to do a deal and so it’s a matter of finding the right strategic fit with the right pricing.

And would they more likely be international, U.S., product additions -- can you give us sort of a high level view of the type of things that you would be looking at?

We would mostly be looking at acquisitions that are related to and would add to our core IT advisory service business.

More in the U.S. or international?

In either -- both, basically. As you know, we are a global company. We are in 80 countries and we like both opportunities domestically as well as around the world.

And final question for me and then I’ll pass it on -- could you talk a little bit about what you are hearing out of CIOs? I know collectively you spend a lot of time with tech people. Are they feeling in generally better? Are they planning to kind of hold their budgets more in the first half and spend more in the second half? If you just give us a little bit of color on what you are hearing out there from the IT world?

There’s a lot of distress in the economy and the CIOs feel that distress and it is -- we look at this by industry, by size of company, by geography around the world and what we have seen is that it is -- it is sort of -- the high level of distress is relatively uniform around the world in terms of what the companies are feeling and CIOs feel that as well. And so if you look at it, the -- this level of distress, my sense of it is, consistent with what I said about our sales forces, as we went through Q1, people kind of are figuring out where they are and getting more comfortable and more comfortable with making decisions than they were at the beginning of Q1. In terms of sort of the specifics, we are expecting IT spending to decline about 3.8% during 2009 at this point, so that’s kind of the quantitative version of that. The good news is things have -- despite all the chaos, things have settled down. I think people are more comfortable making decisions because they’ve got their ’09 budgets, they know what they can do, what they can’t do.

And a lot of the vendors say that Europe is weaker than the U.S. -- you don’t see any difference between the two markets at U.S. and EMEA?

In terms of our business, we’ve seen kind of the same level of impact across geographies.

Interesting. Thank you so much.

At this time, I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Gene Hall for closing remarks.

I want to thank everyone for joining us today and we look forward to reviewing our results next quarter with you. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the presentation. You may now disconnect. Thank you and have a good day.