Voices

For the acquisition folks, the end of the year was pretty much situation normal. But from our company's perspective, we submitted many proposals in the summer that were not acted upon until the final month ? and some not until the final days or hours. It is hard to tell how much was related to the continuing resolution, but I get the sense some are aligning contracts in anticipation of another round of continuing resolutions.New capital investments [were affected] the most, with little or no spending through the first two fiscal quarters. From April on, buying picked up, but the contracting personnel seemed so far behind [that] we anticipated a frenzy in fourth quarter and September. We were not disappointed.This year was noticeably more active than last year. I'm not sure I can attribute it to expecting a continuing resolution, though it could be an effect of last year's continuing resolution. There seemed to be quite a few dollars left.[Our] services side and in the defensemarket, we didn't see much change because most of that business is on longer-termcontracts. From the product side, which is more transactional?there was a definite uptick at the end of the fiscal year, but not as strong as in the past.