Rod Hall
Hey John, one more question for you. I have been talking to buyers out there and there is this perception that you guys are, which I think is a wrong perception that you guys are financially less healthy than some of these other competitors like Good and so on. I mean are you running across that and how do you correct that out in the marketplace?
John Chen
I think that’s a great question, my friend, it’s a great question.
No I’ve not ran into that. The conversation really has changed since I’ve started. A year ago people were just worried that we’re not going to be around and even my friends who are decision-makers have said to me, “You showed up too late”, or “It’s too late”, or whatever.
As the year has gone by it’s completely different. The conversation I have with these people –the buyers — are very different. They want to know what the interesting things are. The only question they have is you going across too broad, I said no and here is the reason why.
Making money and generating cash have got to be the number one priority and this is what I’m pleased with all that this past quarter and we’ll continue to drive that forward because it is nothing that is more powerful than people would say, well financial, I would say, “What do you mean?”
I’ve got $3.1 billion of cash in the bank. I generate cash. I make money. I got fresh products. I’m not quite sure exactly what you meant by whether you have any concern of ours.
And it’s a short conversation, if it’s even a conversation. So I think, I hope you agree and maybe we’ll continue to exchange notes, that the perception should be changing, if not already.
Rod Hall
Yeah, okay. Thanks a lot John.
John Chen
Thank you. I think I only have time for two more because I got to run to the next meeting. How’s that?
Operator
All right we’ll go next to Amitabh Passi with UBS.
Amitabh Passi, Senior Research Analyst at UBS Investment Bank
Hi good morning. Thanks for squeezing me in. I just had a couple.
I guess James, the question for you was on the OpEx line. I think a couple of quarters ago you said that you thought the OpEx was at fairly healthy levels. You’re down $100 million I think in the last two quarters so I’m not worry about an uptick in OpEx I guess I’m just trying to figure out how much more should we expect OpEx to continue to decline?
And maybe when you answer than if you could also just help us understand the fixed versus variable component, because I am a little surprised it’s down another $100 million just in the past couple of quarters. And then I had a follow up for John.
James Yersh
Sure, in terms of OpEx I don’t think you can expect a significant decline from where we are. Ultimately we worked hard to make sure we get the right resources to support growth, and that they are aligned to the proper function, Amitabh, as John had talked about.
In terms of fixed versus variable, definitely something like amortization would be fixed and a little bit harder to influence, although we are focused on working with that. Headcount we talked about being through the reduction plans and so there is a definitely, that’s a fixed piece that we’re dealing with now. But we still do have a lot of discretionary spend.
In terms of a percentage we are skewed to salaries and benefits. So we do have some leverage, but again we have to plan to now support growth from where we are.
Amitabh Passi
Right okay.
And then John just a follow-up for you threw out a quite an impressive list of BES 12 customers, Tata, Boeing, Automatic, the whole bunch. Can you give us a sense, of just the scope of the deployment, are these are pilots, are they revenue paying customers, are you 100% the choice of EMM, or is that again a mixed environment? Just some context around some of these customer deployments for BES 12.
John Chen
Right, the stat that I have 70% of our customers, customers mean paying customers. The list I gave you are all paying customer, okay?
The ones that you mentioned Tata and McKenzie, and Automatic and all that, they’re all paying customers. And the stat I have is about 70% are on cross-platform, meaning that they are buying, they are using our EMM solutions on the iPhone and in iPads and the Android and other devices, in addition to the BlackBerry. So I think in a couple of cases where no BlackBerry is involved at all. So it seems like the wind is rather healthy.
