Friday, August 7, 2015

"No one deployed an application as large as yours, based on this Software Product"

In a previous post titled: Consultants Typology: The Self-deprecating Consultant, I promised to depict examples of my consultancy, which was exactly the opposite of a Self-deprecating Consultant consultancy. 

This post describe a Case Study of that type few decades ago.

The title of this post is a quote of the words I said to a CIO. I implied that the product's Scalability is not adequate for thousands of users. 

I could say it explicitly as well, however my goal was to perform a consultancy project and get paid for it. 

The first step of the consultancy will be dedicated to proving that using the product he thought of is a guaranteed failure. 

The second step will be a selection process of an adequate product. 

The third step could be helping the customer to deploy the selected product properly.

Surprise
"No problem, I will be the first to deploy a large application based on this product". 
He did not use my consultancy services.

The CEO was fired after completing the system development and deploying it. 
The system worked perfectly with 10 users and 20 users, but was collapsed when hundreds of users used it. 

The system was build for few thousand users. The CEO wasted few years and a lot of money. 

The Business users lack a crucial Core Business application.     

A Conspiracy of Silence
About 50% of the enterprises in my country selected that product for Large Applications. All of them fail and lost Time and Money.

No one told his colleagues that he failed ( except a brave CIO presenting his failure in a conference few years after the failure).

I was less popular than other Consultants by worrying all my customers not to select the Software product. 

I lost Consultancy Projects bids because the Local Distributor was large and influential.

Is anyone Capable of Deploying the Software Product successfully for Complex Applications used by a Large number of users?
The answer is definitely not. 
The product was an excellent product, as long as it was deployed for relatively simple applications used by less than 100 users.  

The CIO was arrogant:
The number of organizations in USA which fail was large. No organization in USA was successful.

The assumption that all of them fail because they were not wise or were not good IT professionals was ridiculous.

Gartner's analysts, Meta Group analysts and IDC analysts opinion was similar to mine.

My Take
I was lucky. I recommended to many customers to avoid of that product, as far as Large and Complex systems were concerned. The CIO which was fired was the only one who ignored my advice. 



  


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