"There are no performance issues, but if I have fewer partners [and they] understand my business better, I can get price benefits; I also look beyond that to see what value they can bring."

The winner will be charged with the running of mainframe, network support, and "potentially the opportunity of managing the pSeries and iSeries going forward but not currently in scope".

Carline believes large outsourcing contracts "tend to come in cycles", and although he is looking at consolidation it won't be to the extent that it fails to bring an appropriate level of expertise and scale.

The B Cubed project will not include an open source strategy, but Baycorp does "occasionally use" open source software and is employing a proof of concept for intrusion detection around open source.