I had a good meeting with a local (DC Metro area) telecom customer - they realy liked the look of where the product has been going the last few releases. We spent over an hour talking about the new stuff, and then I had a brief chat with the local division manager. That was enlightening.

It seems that an increasing number of decisions - even relatively low level ones, like whether to upgrade a particular product - are being influenced by Sarbanes-Oxley. Between the actual provisions of the law, and the perceived documentation needs, there's a lot of caution. Documentation on what's changed is very important, as is the need to track specific software configurations - these folks were concerned about the latter. Why? They are using an older rev of our product, with ENVY. They understand how to document all of that stuff with what they have now, but aren't sure how it would work with Store.

I found that interesting. There's work for us to do on that score, but also education. Sarbanes-Oxley is starting to have an interesting impact on vendor/client relations, that's for sure.