The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
gra...@ase.com.au (Graeme Gibson) writes: > And before people throw too many stones at IBM .. > > Let's say that Air NZ were to switch IT facilities providers, either > now, or when the current contract term is up, what's the chance that > they will do any better next time? I'd suspect that the different > facilities providers, like IBMs, EDS/HP, CSC et al, at some level are > themselves using common suppliers for things like, oh let's say, > diesel powered generator sets, airconditioning, telecommunications, > electricians, building security, plumbers and, dare I say it, IT > contractors, systems programmers and so forth. So, choose whichever > overarching supplier you will, underneath they're likely to have at > least some exposures in common, especially in a small-ish community > like New Zealand. a decade or so ago ... one of the offspring had college job working for air freight forwarder ... and had access to major res systems to scheduling freight in planes (those containers that go into belly of the plane). one of the issues was that they still took down the res system a couple times a month ... usually sunday nights (to do things like rebuild databases) ... but sometimes they were still offline monday morning. we got invited in to one of the major res. systems to look at rewriting parts of it. initial look was at "routes" (find flts to get from origin to destination) ... and they had ten major things that they wanted to do (that they couldn't do). A couple months later, I came back with implementation that ran 100 times faster for the things that they currently did ... and all ten impossible things (so overall it was only about ten times faster). then the hand-wringing started. It turned out that many of the things they couldn't do was because they had possibly 400 people involved in manual processes (like databases rebuilding). changing the paradigm to do all ten impossible things, eliminated those manual processes ... and the jobs for those 400 people. part of the paradigm change was having done work on chip design physical layout ... so the slightly over 4000 airports in the world ... and something less than unique 500,000 flt segments (i.e. take-off/landings) from the full OAG (all airlines in the world) ... was fairly straight-forward. -- 40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
