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Michigan Sues HP Over Decade Long, $49 Million Incomplete Project
itwbennett writes: On Friday, embattled HP was hit with a new lawsuit filed by the state of Michigan over a 10-year-old, $49 million project that called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe-based system built in the 1960s. Through the suit filed in Kent County Circuit Court, the state seeks $11 million in damages along with attorney's fees and the funds needed to rebid and re-procure the contract.
The deal was brokered with EDS, which was then purchased by HP.
The CEO was Michael H. Jordan at the time. Blame #23.
No love for Carly, but HP has been in death throes for some time. Back in the 80s they had everyone take a forced vacation day every other Thursday, which was the first I heard of that sort of practice, and the locals were surprised and concerned that such a giant company needed to take such action. HP had gone previously through a lot of growth spurts and had bought up new properties to expand into. But it started dwindling away after that point. Most of the original HP businesses were ejected ever time, making it really difficult to continue calling it a "tech" company. Carly was just one in a line of executives involved in the dismantling of the institution.
"At 50 million bucks, why didn't they emulate the old machinery or port the code to an interpreter running on a modern system?"
The hardware isn't an issue with IBM mainframes, even their newest Z-Series implementations are mostly backwards compatible with the 1960's era System/360. I'm pretty sure the cost of new hardware would have been cheaper than porting their software over to a completely new hardware platform and language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
" But (reluctantly...) in all fairness, getting off the mainframe is very VERY difficult,"
Having worked on well over a dozen projects to do just that, this post is 100% on-point, although my success rate has been much better, on projects that span half-a-decade :-) I'm working on one right now to port a COBOL/IMS system over to .NET and SQL Server that has been in the works for over 2 years.
The hardware platform isn't the biggest hurdle (although expensive, it's bullet-proof reliable). The biggest challenges boil down to three things:
1) Business rules coded in languages long considered obsolete (COBOL, JCL, IMS databases) by people who either retired or died decades ago.
2) Data that has been severely polluted over the years, such has having fax numbers in an address field, lookup codes that have been deleted, (although the data remains in place, causing broken referential integrity), etc etc.
3) Business rules that are done more for tradition. A user may have been instructed to do a process a certain way, but no one is sure what the reasoning is for doing it. It may be a valid reason; but that reason was discovered years ago by someone (either retired or dead), forgotten, and has just been done for traditions sake. In cases like this, it's hard to make a case to carry a process like that over to the new system, but it can't just be ignored either.
I'm simplifying #3, but you'll probably get the idea. I think that these three problems could crop up in ANY software system that has been in use for 40 years, regardless of the hardware platform or the programming language. As much as we try to mitigate planning for the future use a system, very few people in our industry really expect the software we write to be in use 40+ years from now. I think Y2K is a pretty good example of that too :-)
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True, but HP should have known this based on experience with other mainframe projects or via research on similar projects by other companies.
(1) The contract was made by EDS. HP had nothing to do with it, other than having acquired EDS.
(2) The migration is not just off the mainframe (a VMS system), it's onto a web-based platform instead, so they can get rid of both the mainframe, and the extra VT320 emulator they have to run to talk to the thing.
(3) Getting the same functionality and security of of a non-VMS system is a rather difficult endeavor, even if you use FLASK Linux or a similar purportedly secure computing platform, and add a bunch of them together and try to pretend "it's the same as a mainframe". Of all systems one can get off easily, VMS is not one of them, since it's so much better designed than most modern systems.
Scope of the task is *LARGE*
It's a doable proposition, but it would likely take (expensive to hire) 40+ year olds with experience in both sets of technology, along with people capable of parsing "business rules" out of languages like COBOL, FORTRAN, BLISS, and VAX (or DEC Alpha) assembly language, and whatever the heck else it was coded in at the time it was first deployed (depends on what they meant by "aging mainframe" in 2005).
These people would also have to be either very sophisticated in working over a "Chinese Wall" arrangement with another group doing the new systems development (not a development model most younger coders are familiar with, since you mention "interface contracts" and "unit testing" and "branch path analysis" to most of them, and they blink at you as if you've just taken a polyjuice potion and turned into Mad Eye Moody). Alternately, these old farts would need to have *also* kept current on new technology to allow them to be able to do both sides of the task.
So, you are talking expensive people in their mid 40's to mid 50's to get the job done.
Guess who were the first people let go or offered early retirement packages, to improve the profit-per-employee ratio for EDS to get the highest valuation in the acquisition by HP? Guess who were let go or offered early retirement as "cost reduction" measures in the four or five rounds of that HP has gone through since then?
It's a doable job, but I don't know of a company in the EDS (HPE now) or IBM Global Services space right now that wouldn't just start over an "fix business rules problems as they come up", rather than providing an equivalent (but now web based) system. I don't know experienced people in either of those two, since they've jettisoned all their expensive (talented) old people and replaced them with cheap (untalented) recent grads or offshoring.
If you think that's an unfair comparison on talent ... if you were a talented college grad, would *you* go to work at a company which is in the throes of a 30,000+ person layoff (something IBM did earlier this year, BTW: HP is a "late bloomer"), and in the process of spinning out the division you'd be working in? Or would you take that offer from Uber/Facebook/Twitter/Google/[anyone but IBM or HP] instead?
They are likely going to have to hire someone and PM it themselves. States are notoriously bad at that (and at spending money on their own people, as opposed to being willing to spend a lot of money on a contractor company) -- look at how Oregon and Oracle are arguing about the [still] nonfunctional Oregon State Healthcare Exchange to see what comes of hiring your own [unqualified] PM and "doing it yourself".
My cousin, Mark, could do it. Sadly, he is disabled now.
I could do it; so could a dozen or so people I could name off the top of my head (Wes Peters, for one). Sadly, we are all sane now.
They are pretty screwed; they are going to have to do a "second system syndrome" version of things, or settle with HP/HPE and pa