The Oracle Practice continues to see signs of growth in the market. Our largest clients are beginning to call us more often than we are calling them. We are also beginning to see increased hiring activity by the large system integrators. While compensation packages appear to lag a little behind, the fact remains that this is an indication that there are more deals to be won and that they are long-term opportunities. B2B Contract Consultants that have a strong desire to move into permanent positions, or who are approached by their current clients, should contact Heather Arnold or Ken Johnson. We will assist you in getting the best package possible.

The Public Sector continues to lead the way in terms of new deals, with several new placements at federal agencies over the last two months. However, IBM has given us a huge boost by choosing to use us as their preferred provider of staff augmentation for their commercial business. We hope that this status will also put us in position to provide more traditional consulting services for their small to mid-size clients, which is one of our strategies for growth in the coming year. We are also exploring opportunities with Oracle Sales where we can position ourselves as a low cost systems implementation provider early in the software sales cycle, helping them to sell their software and us to sell our services.

One project deserves highlighting thismonth as it also spotlights an outstanding consultant. We have been teamed with BearingPoint since October on an opportunity at The American Red Cross. While the pursuit has been taking place, BearingPoint has been working at Red Cross

Until Q4, 2003, Siebel Systems license sales were battered by a weak economy, increasing competition, and smaller deal sizes. However, Q4 showed significant improvement. "Across the board in the fourth quarter, we saw an improved business climate for investing in information technology," said Tom Siebel, chairman and CEO, on a conference call. Sales, while remaining below the $394.7 million in the December 2002 quarter, are expected to rise around 14 percent on the third quarter, License fees, meanwhile, are expected to rise 36 percent from the third quarter.

"These results underscore our belief that the CRM buyer is beginning to re-emerge after a hiatus of more than two years," wrote John Torrey, an analyst at Adams, Harkness & Hill. Torrey said that demand for Siebel products is broad-based and a number of deals have been in the seven-figure range, according to his channel checks.

Sources within Siebel tell me that the Sales Pipeline has not been this strong for 18 months, at least. So, 2004 should present the consulting community with strong opportunities. Upgrades are increasing within the Public Sector, Pharmaceutical, Insurance, Banking, and telecom sectors. Shelfware is being deployed, which is still hurting current sales, but clearing the inventory for future license sales.

At the moment, Analytics and Call Center are, by far, Siebel's strongest products. The entire area of business intelligence is hot. Within Siebel, Analytics is being bundled into the majority of the license opportunities. Another strategic initiative within Siebel is UAN and it is generating a lot of focus within Siebel. The integration market is estimated at $90 billion a year and ranks as one of the top CIO spending initiatives for the next several

B2B Workforce’s SAP practice ended 2003 on a very high note. We became engaged with many new clients both in the Commercial and Public Sector spaces. New Commercial engagements included: Dr. Pepper, SalesLink, Alpine Electronics, Novartis, Solea, T-Mobile, Home Depot and others. Also, thru our partnerships with the major Systems Integrators we also became engaged on various Public Sector projects. These included: US Navy Convergence, US Customs, NASA, DLA, Erie County and the State of Louisiana.

The outlook for 2004 is also very bright. We teamed with BearingPoint and SAP on the Department of Interior proposal. The project was awarded to us on January 1 and will begin in mid February. This is a $150 million SAP project that will be seeking consulting resources with Real Estate,

The PeopleSoft Practice has been successful in recent work with IBM Public Sector while participating with them in the development of a written response of the BART (Bay Area Regional Transportation) System in San Francisco, request for proposal. The nature of the proposal is multi-faceted, requiring complete planning, installation, training, testing and placing into production PeopleSoft Financials, HRMS and SCM product suites. IBM agreed to two important B2B support delineations should IBM win the 3 year and $30M contract.

• Preferred supplier to IBM for PeopleSoft and other consulting resources in the areas of PeopleSoft as well as our expertise in support of Oracle since that was the selected database of choice, even though BART doesn’t use Oracle at all.

• B2B conveyed enough strength in PeopleSoft, we were able to be more prominent than BearingPoint in our ability to visualize and communicate effective training methodology. Result was B2B winning sole delivery of all training to Bart technical and end-users should IBM win the contract.

Additionally, the PeopleSoft Practice has been attentive to rounding out the B2B PeopleSoft Higher Education Consulting Offerings and writing a White Paper that highlights the benefits of PeopleSoft Version 8 for presentation to key clients.

As a result of these efforts, we anticipate the following areas of PeopleSoft to be key hot areas in the next 6 months with the need for resources: SCM, HRMS, FI, Higher Ed, and Version8 experience, as well as EPM. Please contact PeopleSoft Recruiter, Chad Salinas, (770-667-7208) to update your resume or refer your friends as part of our referral program.
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