Skip to main content

"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. 



  


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The mainframe: still alive and kicking

Recently, I was interviewed by  Pcon   (unfortunately the link points to an Hebrew only site) as part of debriefing on Legacy Systems.  Pcon is an Israeli company investigating IT topics by quoting professional articles and interviewing experts. They publish the results of the investigations including practical recommendations. This post is mainly about topics raised by me during the interview, but not included in the debriefing, which will be published.    What are Legacy Systems? The term Legacy Systems refers to old application systems and/or veteran technologies still in use.  Usually, the term Legacy Systems is associated with: 1. Mainframe Hardware e.g. IBM System z and its Operating Systems or Proprietary Servers and Operating Systems such as HP Alpha and OpenVMS Operating System, IBM AS/400 and OS/400   Operating System. 2. Development and Production Environments, e.g. COBOL , Natural and DBMS systems such as Adabas  ...

Will Business and IT Aligned?

For decades we are talking about closing the gap between business and IT , but the gap is still as wide as it was. In the beginning of the ERP era, we focused on aligning Business Processes and Core Systems, but in most enterprises we failed. SOA was the next alignment promise: defining the SOA Services in Business boundaries instead of Technical boundaries, should narrow the gap. However, despite of SOA Business Value ( Agility and Reuse )  in most enterprises,  the large Business-IT Gap remained as large as it was.  The IT Community aimed at the next alignment attempt: SOA is technical and BPM is its Business related complement.  Will the current BPM based alignment attempt succeed? I do not know, but Nick Heath's article  titled: Stop doing what the vendors tell you, CIOs told , published in  Tech Republic , suggests that the root of the problem is not Technological .   Stop Doing What the vendors Tell You Nick Heath's article is based ...

Vendors Survival: Will Software AG Survive until 2019?

This post is another post in the Vendors Survival series following posts on Microsoft , Google , HP , Sun and EMC . On July 14 th Software AG and IDS Scheer announced that Software AG is going to take over IDS Scheer . The intended acquisition is an opportunity to add another post in my Vendors Survival posts series. A brief history of Software AG Mainframe products Software AG is larger than any German software company except SAP . It was established in the Mainframe age (in 1969). I worked with many customers, who used and some of them are still using, its two flagship products Adabas and Natural . Although these products support many platforms, their main platform is IBM Mainframe. Adabas is a database and Natural is a development environment. Like other pairs of Database and Development Environment in the mainframe environment (e.g. Ideal and Datacom , Mantis and Supra) build by the same vendor, they are tied together. As a result, although it is possible t...