Industry committee  Without question, it is important to understand how important security technology is. The technology that we use, of course, is public key elliptic curve technology. We've been using it for years, and it's been one of the core competitive advantages we've had in the BlackBerry and why it's so widespread in government use, military use, and law enforcement use.

Industry committee  We had signed NDAs with them. I believe we had signed two different NDAs with them—

Industry committee  Well, they didn't honour their commitments to us. They changed the deal dramatically, and the more they changed the deal as time went on, all the value that we were interested in started to vanish.

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  We were close a number of times, and in fact we were so close that we were discussing announcing the deal a few days after we thought we had a handshake.

Industry committee  There were two aspects to this. First, we didn't know they were filing for bankruptcy when we began the process and thought we had reached a deal. Remember, they weren't selling off their assets at the time. This was based on discussions we had with them, and they thought it was a good idea.

Industry committee  No. I want to be absolutely clear here. We had a deal and were pursuing that deal, and then the bankruptcy procedure surprised us. That allowed us to open the scope of the deal, so we discussed a much larger deal with Nortel at the time. We felt we had an agreement, but that's when we were informed that they were pursuing other agreements with other companies.

Industry committee  —in order to begin the discussions and to complete the transaction. What surprised us was when we realized that much of the value had been given to the stalking horse bid. At that point we decided that we needed to enter the larger auction, because it was clear to us that we couldn't complete the transaction as originally agreed to.

Industry committee  I think it's clear that we would have continued to grow the investment that Nortel has pioneered. There are excellent employees and high-quality talent there today. Some of them, of course, are leaving the company as we speak. It's important that we realize that many of the customers Nortel had are also our largest customers today, companies like Verizon.

Industry committee  RIM has over 12,000 employees today, and over 5,000 of those are in technology. We found in the past that it was difficult for us to find really good people in technology and be able to grow as fast as we needed to grow to keep up with the market, the opportunity, and our customers.

Industry committee  The discussions started months before they filed for bankruptcy.

Industry committee  Much of that is actually explained in detail in my brief. I'm not an expert on the act. What I can tell you, though, is that the transaction is a very large one. I can tell you that the players who participated in the process thought it was a very important one, and they bet large amounts of money on it.

Industry committee  Thank you very much for that question. We don't currently have offices in Quebec. We do support university research there. What I can tell you is that as RIM started to grow very, very quickly, we were surprised that we outgrew the ability of our local population and institutions to supply us with high-quality personnel.

Industry committee  Those are very good questions. We started working with Nortel earlier than the bankruptcy process. We realized there were some assets there that we were interested in, and we started good faith discussions with them that came very close to completion. We were surprised by the bankruptcy announcement, but we didn't give up and we continued working with their staff and their senior management, and we expanded the scope of the purchase because it was being offered during the bankruptcy procedure.

Industry committee  Sure. The best way to think about the stalking horse process is that it's a baseline created by the first bidder, and then other bidders have to build on top of that without changing it. And that's the critical piece: without changing it. Unfortunately, the stalking horse bid was structured in such a way that it critically reduced the value of the LTE assets to us and to other companies.