Hi.  I’m Rab Govil, CEO of Caslon, and one of the topics I would like to discuss is about business process outsourcing.  One of the big trends we are seeing in the marketplace this year is that lots and lots of enterprises now are starting to take a hard look at their marketing supply chain, as well as their product supply chain, and figuring out what part of the process they need to outsource.  It used to be that a marketing organization would just go to an agency and the agency would manage their campaign soup to nuts.  

What we found out—what we have found out is about five years ago a transition happened that in the television industry folks went from having two different providers for managing their marketing campaign.  They had the provider who made the content of the commercial, and they had another organization that was responsible for placing the media, and buying the media, and managing the media in the space, because they needed that level of specialization.

Well, we are finding out the same level of specialization is starting to happen in direct marketing or in the packaging media.  The agencies are now being asked to focus on what they are good at, which is to provide strategy and creative, and we are seeing this advent of what we call these marketing operations agencies.  These marketing operations agencies don’t do strategy, they don’t do segmentation, but they do a very, very good job of executing on the versioning.  They do a good job of kind of managing the data.  They do a good job of providing all the infrastructure and enterprise needs to be able to get the message out most efficiently and most cost-effectively.  

So I think this creates an enormous opportunity for our members where they need to also start thinking about themselves as not just production providers, but helping execute the marketing operations process at their customers, because the customers are interested in finding the specialized providers who have the know-how and the knowledge to do this efficiently.  Because literally, they don’t really have the resources to make that happen, because while they’re interested in the sales, they’re not as interested in the execution to get it done.

So we think this trend—we expect this trend to continue to accelerate over the next few years.  The trick would be is this going to create a whole new set of companies that’ll come out in the space, or the existing set of companies will take advantage of this and help to kind of continue to work with the customers and make them more successful.