Yes - given previous announcements around this time of year of a...

Yes - given previous announcements around this time of year of a similar ilk in the past I don't think this gives a great deal of comfort to IT&e shareholders or potential investors. Reading between the lines:

I suspect that "North America" means Canada rather than the USA. If it was the USA and I was IT&e, I would be saying "USA" rather than "North America". There are undoubtably good deals to be had from time to time in Canada, but the volume of financial activity, and hence the potential revenue in the deal, is likely a lot less than that in the USA or London.

It sounds like some new exchange/clearing house venture. These things get tried out from time to time. Sometimes they take off and sometimes they don't. Hence, we are likely not talking about a deep pocketed customer here like a major bank for which counterparty credit risk is extremely important and for which they might pay a decent license/maintenance fee. The fact that IT&e don't indicate the approximate size of the up front fee suggests to me that it is not huge. IT&e never to my knowledge gave any details on the size of the deals with the ASX and the London mob either. I never felt that counterparty credit risk would really be that big of a deal for an exchange/clearing house that they would be prepared to spend a lot on risk management software.

The other thing is the notion of "partner" and annuity/upside rather than customer and maintenance contract. This again to me suggests a small budget compared with a big bank deal and maybe some credos and some more recognition in the industry but perhaps not a lot to add to the bottom line.

The other announcement burried in there of a London based bank using Razor for economic capital again sounds interesting but then why no details of the size of the deal and why not put out a separate announcement with some fanfare? Sometimes big or small banks can have a tactical risk requirement (market or counterparty credit risk) around a single desk or division that might be using an older style of capital calculation that is too punitive, perhaps because the counterparty(s) is risky or the products sophisticated, so they need a modern calculation system to get better numbers. In such cases, the overall project size is usually small because it is a small division compared with the high value/volume stuff. This may be the kind of thing at work here. This was kind of the case with HSBC, for which I understand Razor was used for an SUV's risk requirements as part of it's conditions to achieve a certain credit rating or some such. The actual deal size for IT&e was pretty small, as reflected in the European revenue reports.

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Going against this negativity is the fact that the 3 major shareholder companies all participated in the recent (rather small) placement. Maybe they have a better understanding of the nature of these deals or the other two "big" deals mentioned in the announcement that are "spilling over". The market cap of IT&e is pretty low at the moment, so if these deals are big and they materialise next financial year then it may be worth a punt at around 4c.