Your humble servant is writing you today with tears in my eyes and red ink in my spreadsheet. We lost a major outsourcing contract with a long-time client, one for which we sucked about $1.2B in revenues during the past 10 years. Yeah, these things happen.
I gotta tell you, a 10-year outsourcing contract is like a marriage. The first year you cater every possible need of your wife, you buy her expensive gifts and you go the extra mile every day. After 10 years you spend most of your nights in strip clubs pretending you have important business meetings. It's the same with a client. After a few years you start to ignore complaints because clients whine all the time. You then become so integrated with the client business that you think you ARE the client, and the real client is just an obnoxious bug flying around you. The client complains that he's been stuck with Explorer 6 for the past 10 years, and you list all your other clients that are still using IE6 and are quite happy ignoring that there are newer versions out there.
The most insulting thing about the Desjardins story is that it happened in our own backyard in Montreal. Worse, these nitwits publicly said that they are only considering IBM and HP to replace their beloved CGI. Like that's gonna solve a problem.
Roach out, talk to you soon.
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