'certified' y2k compliant companies

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does anyone know of anywhere on the net there is a list of reliable 'certified' y2k compliant companies, I hear rumors of this or that company but have yet to find any real information, is anyone collecting it somewhere? julienne

-- julienne (bootman@value.net), April 23, 1998

Answers

Julienne,

Frankly I think it's unlikely that you will ever see a company step up to the plate and say "We're 100% Y2K compliant. Come do business with us." To do so is to open up a huge hole for a lawsuit if, in fact, they are not 100% but only 99% compliant and some problems result. Better to issue vague generalities.

BTW, I spoke to a major investment company the other day. I asked if they were Y2K compliant. The representative said, "Oh yes, we've completed our remediation." I asked if I could have a document stating that, perhaps a press release of some kind. He said, "No, we don't have anything like that we could give to the public." Then he volunteered that really they were just beta testing all the changes they had made, which means that they really aren't Y2K compliant at all, just that they have made all their code changes. But then again, maybe even that isn't accurate.

The long and short of it is that we aren't going to get very straight information out of companies.

Best regards,

David

-- David Palm (djpalm@compuserve.com), April 24, 1998.


There was a couple of articles on http://www.year2000.com/y2karticles.html a week or so ago about lawyers getting into the act already and telling companies to make no statements about their Y2K situation including vendors not telling clients about potential problems. They are also advising that IT departments not share information across companies which means every IT department will be working in a silo and each will have to find what someone else may already know. This will slow down an already slow process.

IMHO I think lawyers ought to be banned. I think this is totally irresponsible to advise companies to keep quiet to avoid lawsuits and possibly cause a client problems of unknown severity.

-- Rebecca Kutcher (kutcher@pionet.net), April 24, 1998.


While I agree that the fear of legal action keeps most people quite, there are companies out there that may be taking a more pragmatic approach.

My current employer is finishing up it's Y2K remediation efforts. They began in 1985 before my arrival and are expecting to have completed testing and installation into production by the end of June, 1998. However, we recognize two things:

1. Despite our best efforts, we may not have caught everything. There may yet be Y2K bugs lurking in our systems. We are confident that any such bugs will be minor in nature, but we just don't feel confident that we can say we are 100% complient.

2. Even if all our internal systems are 100% fixed, we interact with and depend on so many external systems (banks, vendors, shippers, etc.) that our business may have problems delivering goods to customers through no direct fault of our own. In other words, just because our systems are Y2K ready, it doesn't mean our business is.

-- Paul Neuhardt (neuhardt@compuserve.com), April 24, 1998.


Yesterday I received a communication via a friend from The Anglo Irish Bank (Austria). According to them, they have been working on the problem since 1994, and during the process have replaced all of their aging systems for those which are complaint and re-written all their own software with their own software engineers. The only problem is that for most of us, this bank is in Austria or Dublin. Also, no one knows what will happen with the Euro and y2k. I don't expect that the fed wire will work for very long either, so if you decide to drive over to Austria, well...... But no one can say that there is no bank which claims to be compliant. This one does!! JS

-- Joseph Smith (zarathu@epix.net), April 24, 1998.

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