You touched on the notion of co-sourcing at Harrah's and how that has been productive for your application development by shortening productive times by locating vendor employees internally. How does that work, and who are these strategic partners that you bring into your application development groups? There are some vendors that we have looked at as strategic partners and worked with in this co-sourcing model. The idea is there are certain initiatives we wanted to drive, and it is not always about delivering something itself but how you do that smarter. We have generally tried to select people that bring some unique set of technology and vision and a sense of collaboration that we can work well with. I retained Sapient to work on some of our initial Harrahs.com and Total Rewards and other relaunches. What I liked about them is they did a lot of firm, fixed-price bids. That forces you to be really good at how you scope and manage that work. We've actually co-developed a lot of our methodologies with them that we call Harrah's Integrated Toolkit that helps us figure out requirements gathering.

We have generally about five or 10 at any given time strategic partnerships that we have been able to leverage on a repeatable basis. Implementation is a challenge for us as we continue to scale. We looked at where we need help today and what the big picture is and for our newest co-sourcing project selected Siemens, given their global scope and scale and reach. They have been helping on some of the rollouts on the integration procedures and from that, if we find there is good synergy between the two companies ... then we will continue to ramp up that partnership and investment.