Well yesterday we got word that we lost a major MAJOR contract with the State of Montana, our primary client. This marks a sea change in how they deal with us and it's not good. It sets us up to lose a lot of work in the future. Add on to that, the winning bidder is, IIRC, using offshore "talent" AND they came in $6-16 million over our bid AND the client's budget.
For the nerds:
Much of our business has been supporting the health and human services division with mainframe applications in RDMS and COBOL (two things I know little about-I'm on the web application design side of things) for the past 18 years. These systems involved Medicaid eligibility and child support enforcement, primarily. The state is starting to move these systems off the mainframe and onto Oracle backed web-based applications. The first of which launched in the past month, a new Medicaid eligibility system. This system is going to be the basis for converting all new systems under a common Enterprise Service Bus (think of it as an IT umbrella and each of these systems as a module plugged into that architecture). This latest contract that we lost was to convert the food stamps system and one other system to this new architecture, as well as build the ESB for future systems.
By losing the ESB work especially, it will be much harder to win the bids on converting those few remaining systems over. Once support for those legacy systems is no longer required, we're done.
For the normals:
So, in a nutshell: We're screwed. I'm not losing my job, at least not right away. I have an interesting niche in my office. I am the only one who does several functions in the office, and one of two that do another. It will likely be a long slow death of attrition, as the winning vendor raids our office for developers and project managers for the local development activities, then if we don't step up the new business in other areas, they'll have to start "shedding" employees. I don't know where I rank in that process. The winning vendor likely won't come knocking on my door, as I see it, even though I designed the interface for that system that just went live.
I won't go work for the state, even if there wasn't a hiring freeze. But I do have another out. One of my current jobs is administrator for our requirements management software, by IBM. There's a good chance that knowledge could land me a job with IBM in some sort of training or support capacity, but I haven't pursued it.