At 06:42 PM 3/2/2004, you wrote: >Up to a point, the SAS Alliance Partnership offers many of the things >that you write about.

Is it free of charge to be a partner in SAS Alliance Partnership ?

>As a former Alliance Partner, I can tell you that >the "Partners" are often in competition with the Institute bidding on >the same project. It's also true that some partners are pulled in on >projects by the Institute and are often billed at rates that are >significantly higher than the partner would have quoted to the client. >So, client beware!

Another good reason to set up some kind central place (of course on the Internet) to put bids and review projects.

>There are a lot of things that a client can do to control cost on a >software implementation project. Writing a good and precise RFP and >getting bids from a number of SAS consulting organizations is a good >first step.

With SAS Solutions people deal mostly with data/program integration/interfaces. It's really not so simple matter to write good and precise RFP without good knowledge of SAS. For example, about a year ago one company hired 10 programmers to write SAS code for extracting data from Orcale to SAS. Believe, you know that there is enough only one short macro program to perform this task.

Phil, thank you very much for your response. If you have any other inputs regarding my proposal, don't hesitate to send them to me.

Tanya