Let me give some examples of IT projects.
When you want to build a large data centre, there's a large capital involvement. Building a tier-four data centre costs, per se, $150 million, plus you have to fill it up with servers, communications gear, and so on. From a bureaucratic senior management point of view, it's great. They say a big project may be easier for them to farm out to one company to let them handle the whole thing, from building it to managing it, the whole infrastructure. By doing that there is a risk transfer because they do not want to keep it in-house and break it down into a smaller bite size.
You need lots of talented people to do it, and I believe the government with the 8,000 IT staff they have--with the SSCs they will have 8,000 people--and all those other people who are already managing data centres and their networks. Starting to subcontract might not be the best job, but we are not sure. SSC never said they would do it that way, but there's a tendency at the senior level. When they are talking about it at the large project level they have a tendency, as we've seen year after year. A few years ago it was the government marketplace project. A number of projects are really not doing so well, but they did give the contract to a single contractor.
On the other hand, we've seen it's very effective when they bring it down to a smaller size, a bite size, and the smaller SME contractor can contour much better. They're the subject experts. Often the large company will go to the SME and ask if they want to be their subcontractor and then they make money in between.
