THE REGISTER: "Cap Gemini cautions against Y2K over-optimism"

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From 'THE REGISTER' [UK]: Posted 02/01/2000 2:22pm by Mike Magee

Cap Gemini cautions against Y2K over-optimism

It will be weeks and months before IT directors and businesses can say the Y2K problem is over and done with, a senior executive at major consultancy Cap Gemini warned today.

Harry Blakey, UK divisional director of Cap Gemini's Y2K unit, said that his company had expected few problems at the point when the 20th century became the 21st century.

His company, like many others around the world, has had a team in place over the weekend to watch out for incipient problems.

Blakey said: "It's been immensely boring, but we've been pleasantly bored. We weren't expecting huge problems at the rollover stage."

However, he warned against complacency. "The clock shift in hardware is only part of the process and we'll run tests to at least the end of January and probably until the end of February." Some business processes will need monitoring until the end of this year, he added.

"What we've seen so far is very, very few Y2K problems that even registered on the radar," he said. "Most are little glitches."

Blakey said that the glitches it has found over the weekend have not been business critical and "peripheral to many business processes".

He also said that the fear of Y2K virus problems looks, so far at least, not as big a problem as anticipated. Many large firms have shut down their email system over the new year as a precaution against problems arising.

The real testing time will come when businesses start next week. Monday is a Bank Holiday in the UK, so systems, particularly applications, will be put under real test conditions the day afterwards.

"When application systems are put under full load, it won't be 100 per cent," he warned. Everyone had seemed to think that the rollover period was the real test, but that was not the case.

-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), January 03, 2000

Answers

bold off.

-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), January 03, 2000.

Hey, bold, get off!

-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), January 03, 2000.

[Link: http://www.theage.com.au/bus/20000103/A3816-2000Jan2.html]

The Age Today's Business

Rollover chaos may strike offices by Leon Gettler Monday 3 January 2000

...THE GLOBAL IT INDUSTRY RESEARCH FIRM, THE GARTNER GROUP, EXPECTS THE YEAR 2000 PROBLEM TO CAUSE COMPUTER FAILURES AROUND THE WORLD THROUGHOUT THIS YEAR AND POSSIBLY INTO 2001 AS WELL.

IT HAS FORECAST THAT 50 PER CENT OF Y2K FAILURES WILL BE SPREAD OUT OVER 2000.

THE UNITED NATIONS-SPONSORED Y2K DATA CLEARING HOUSE HAS ALSO WARNED THAT FULL IMPACT OF ANY YEAR 2000 PROBLEMS WILL BE LARGELY HIDDEN UNTIL MID-TO-LATE JANUARY.

THE DIRECTOR OF INTERNATIONAL Y2K COOPERATION CENTER, MR. BRUCE MCCONNELL, SAID Y2K ERRORS WILL BECOME EVIDENT DAYS AND WEEKS AFTER THE ROLLOVER. (end of quote)

[COMMENT: such mainline information suggests that it is inapproprate to discount Y2k at this juncture. Y2k glitches have "apparently" (or non-apparently?) just begun. If so, it will soon render many of these current, Pollytheistic "told you so" banterings, mockings, stonings and scourgings of the so-called Y2k false prophets obsolete as they may yet unexpectedly rise, tattered, from the dead. Time alone will tell the truth...a truth which may--and according to those above acknowledged, mainline sources, will--be bitterly hard for the unprepared to swallow. What would it take to spark off a panic situation? What "per cent" of failures and where and how? One insolvent bank making the headlines? A stock market glitch? A "sudden" gas shortage? A food distribution problem? No electricity or water? Is it all that foolish to think there may be more to it, more to come, then to disregard hardcore information such as shown above?; to magically think it was all just a bad dream that we've now woken from despite all of the previous, exhausting, documented, undeniable facts, and broken, incompliant systems that still exist, waiting to be uncovered? Or, is the nightmare yet to arrive? Nothing has (seemingly) happened yet, but, surely, it will. Surely...it will.]

-- Patrick Lastella (Lastella1@aol.com), January 03, 2000.


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