We got really down on outsourcing a few years ago - but we have moved a fair amount of support to Bangalore and Hyderabad. Application development hasn't been as easy as we thought. Outsourcing is like the flu; as soon as the economy gets socked, it comes back.

How do you handle the demand for everyone to have an upgrade of their PC each year?

We try to hide it - put it on the division's budget. Let's face it; we are a high priced technology purchasing agent. What we really like to do is cut our expenditure on server spending. The day that every app got its own server has got to end. Right now about 25% of our server workloads are virtualized. If the economy continues to suck, we'll grow this number to 35%. The dropping cost of storage helps as does the cost of laptops. We have moved to voice over IP in a big way.

But counter-balancing that is the multi-year SAP implementations that suck up money like a vacuum cleaner. That's sacrosanct - don't ask me why. We are stealing from Peter to pay Hans but we are half done.

When will you be done?