I can't imagine why anyone would ask Accenture to program something as critical and technically demanding as a trading platform. Their public record here in the UK is appalling - the NHS and British Gas are two horrendous cock ups that spring to mind. How on earth do they win these kind of contracts? Brown envelopes?

Absolutely. You know who writes code at Accenture? 22-year-old liberal arts and business majors, in their first job out of college, who've had about 6 weeks of training in programming.

There is a great comment in the article from a person who worked at Accenture...

"I finally quit after walking out of a berating meeting from a boss who reckoned I'd done a project too fast and produced an executable that was too small. "We quoted them three point two million for this. We can't give them a 500 Kb executable after a week and say it's done"

I'd be annoyed if that's all I got.

For 3.2 million, I'd hope for some good documentation, guides, and some fanfare, preferably some evidence of the QA procedure it's been through, too. You can't put ten thousand dollars+ of polish on a project in a week, can you?