This is a list of comments that I picked up on that seemed important enough to me at the time to make a note about. Maybe interesting to you, maybe not. I provided my thoughts with some of the comments.
1) They were disqualified from consideration at the State of Arizona because they have too few people on staff. AZ has an $80 million problem with only $20 million budgeted. They volunteered to do a free pilot project to prove themselves, but no progress has been made yet.
2) Alliance with Strategia: they have terminated the exclusivity portion of the contract. They can now talk directly with people who don't want to go through SAA for the services piece. They are in the process of performing a 9 month contract for the State of Tennessee. 1/3 of the code is almost done. It will be turned back to SAA in about 2 weeks. After that goes through some preliminary testing by SAA, it will be given back to the State of Tennessee. Then the next 1/3 of the code will be delivered to CSGI. (Personal comment: Sounds like an awfully long drawn out process to me.)
3) Investing community awareness ... they want to hold a teleconference about once a month to let their stockholders (and analysts) know what's going on. They'd also like to initiate a newsletter to be sent out about once a month.
4) They have leased another 2,500 square feet in their Phoenix building to handle future expansion. They expect to be running to capacity next year sometime. (At least that's what I think he said ...)
5) Of considerable interest is the fact that they are going to be reducing their per LOC prices starting immediately. They're trying to be price competitive with internal workers, I guess, since they don't consider other vendors to be their competitors. They have finally admitted that data expansion is more expensive than windowing, and thus will charge a different price for the two methods ... just like their competitors ... ooops, sorry .... just like the other vendors.
6) There was a brand new employee there (2 days on the job) who used to work at Platinum doing Y2K conversions. He spoke for about 15 minutes about why he decided to leave Platinum to go to CSGI (automated toolset, small company with big future, etc.). This is the type of person I think they need to hire more of. He has IBM MVS real world experience and can help with the environmental gotcha's that PC types just don't understand. He's definitely NOT a right-out-of-school programmer, so the $50,000 average price per programmer that has been used to estimate their "burn rate" just went up a few bucks. While I liked the fact they have at least one real MVS person, I was disappointed that he sounded an awful lot like a sales support guy doing some pre-sales conditioning of the client. Come on, gang ... the world has plenty of sales folks ... let the techies be techies. OK, off my soap box ...
7) One of the major drawbacks of the "factory" type solutions is the delay in getting the code from the client to the factory. CSGI is considering sending staff onsite to help the clients package the code for shipment. Note that this is where the IBM MVS experience is going to come in handy. It ain't as easy as it sounds. However, if they do this (and I think they have to) then they're going to need more than the 30 people or so they're currently saying is a good thing. It won't do any good to have a nice factory all set up if the code isn't flowing through it continually. They'll need staff at each site and at the factory. One staff rampup about to occur ... |
