VideoAs CFO, you play an important role in selling your new image and product mix to investors. Has that been challenging, particularly in an environment where people are pretty skeptical about the promises of e-business technology?
We're having very little problem selling our concept. It really has been a budget problem more than anything else. When it came time to announce and push our spend management vision, we already had a well drawn-out map for execution. We already had live products to support the vision, as well as a large blue-chip customer list to go with it.
So it has actually been a pretty easy vision to communicate. I will say, though, that we do continue to see tight budgets, and our revenue has declined in the past year. We are by no means forecasting double-digit growth rates based on this product suite. But we are starting to see some stability and a different tone from our customers.
Revenue recognition is an extremely thorny area of accounting for finance managers at technology companies. Is revenue recognition an area of concern to you?
One of the good pieces of advice I got coming into this job was 'Get into revenue recognition and the policies associated with it.' Since I have come on board I have had several sessions with my internal accounting staff, as well as my external accounting partners, to get brushed up on revenue recognition as it relates to the software industry. For the software industry, revenue recognition is an entirely different animal. It is also something that gets a great degree of focus from our shareholders and the investment community.
I would say revenue recognition is the number one accounting area I spend most of my time on. I look at individual deals quite closely from a revenue recognition perspective. We also have a revenue recognition department within Ariba. It is an area we have invested a substantial amount of resources in, to make sure that we are treating these deals appropriately and are in compliance with GAAP. It is certainly a much bigger area of focus than I would have expected prior to joining Ariba.
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