Okay, yeah…you want to start David?

Response:

Speaking briefly from not just Siemen’s perspective, but our division of Siemen’s as well in that Siemen’s is heavily involved in electronics and electrical particularly on the infrastructure side.  In areas that have been wiped out by war and bombing, Siemen’s is actually doing quite well in helping rebuild those areas.  In that respect, it’s helped us in Johnson City, some of the products that we build that are sold to those parts of the world.  Do we like it?  Not necessarily, you know, for the reasons…but we do like the opportunity to keep our jobs in Tennessee.

Question:

Uh hmm…Jack you wanna?

Response:

I’ll add a little bit to (that’s a good question Charles, nice to see you again) from the IT perspective.  I’d say there are two really clear impacts that have come from this.  One is, as David said, in the areas that have been affected by terrorist activities around the world and the ensuing activities that follow, because we’re a large multi-national company, we’ve been quick to jump in and help rebuild and so forth, so we’re pretty active about that.  The other, in fact I shared this with a class I was in earlier today, was one that we didn’t expect, but some time not long after the Department of Homeland Security was created, our CEO was in a meeting, and she was interrupted to say will you take this phone call and man says it’s important…well, “tell me a little more, who is it, you know, what are they up to?” and the person coming to her said, “well, um, it’s Tom Ridge, the head of Homeland Security, he wants to talk with you.”  So she thought, well, this is a call I’ll take, you know, quick decision.  She says, “Well hello Tom,” and so forth.  He said, “Well, you just pulled of the biggest merger in the history of the world in terms of IT companies coming together, you know, wildly different cultures, and it seems to have gone really well,” you know, the company didn’t tank, or whatever, you had to make a lot of tough decisions, and he said, I’ve got these 22, or I don’t know whatever it is, agencies coming together could I spend some time with you and kind of learn what you did, you know any pointers and things like that.  So they had themselves some conversations and she pulled in some of the people from the integration team that was put together between when the merger, or the intent to merge I should say, was announced and the actual merger was just a period of months.  She pulled in some people who had worked on that integration team and they then began to work with Tom’s different department heads or whatever and actually developed a pretty close working relationship to share back and forth.  So that, you know, how does that affect the company’s business, well, I’m not to sure, but what we recognized was that there were actually some added value that we could provide to customers who were dealing with issues of integration, meaning cultural integration and so forth beyond the IT specifics about the bits and bytes, or whatever, that we could offer, and so, we now offer that as a consulting line to work with people who are doing big integrations.  I don’t know whether we would have thought of that had it not been for Tom Ridge calling, yet in a way, I guess it’s kind of obvious when we merge companies of that size and scale and it works.  So, that was an unpredicted consequence, Charles, from that merger, the war on terror was a factor in that, otherwise you know we may not have had the Department of Homeland Security in the first place.