My company provides software (and some hardware) to over 600 customers (hospitals, medical centers, insurance companies...) across America and a smattering in other countries. To date, MAYBE half of these customer's have upgraded to our year 2000 compliant versions (which have mostly been available since winter 97/98). We know that customer's who try to use the software across the century change will have unrecoverable data corruption. With the average install (with date conversion and all) taking a week or more, and only half a dozen tech reps on our side, our customer's don't stand a chance.

How is our understaffed department supposed to support them after their systems have failed? How many cancelled contracts will we get because it will simply take too long to fix them? How many of our customer sites will be forced to shut down (the business units that use our software are "overhead") putting how many people (mostly nurses) out of work?

All that for one non-critical, non-compliant system.

One additional note. We have a small product line (only 150-200 customers) that we only recently got the upgrade for. I have been assigned since mid-July to doing upgrades for this system. In three months I have had four upgrades scheduled... and four cancelled. Total upgrades complete? (I hope you all can do THAT math) I told my boss these folks are going to wait until it fails next year. He is starting to believe me.

Cel

"Am I coming in clear? I say, Mom! Am I coming in clear?"

-- Y2Krazy (maxcel@swlink.net), September 24, 1999

Answers

Thanks again, Cel.

Yes, the procrastinators are setting themselves, and those around, up them for "changes" next year. If not worse, in the life-critical functions.

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), September 24, 1999.