$400 Million Over 5 Years Amount invested: $400 million over 5 years Organization: Large financial company Original Plans: Develop a new and highly strategic application on client/server, defining client/server as Unix-based distributed systems with GUIs at the desktops. The new application was supposed to allow users to concurrently update data on the Unix servers. Selected hardware and software from Sun Microsystems to build the new Unix-based infrastructure. The intention was to merely supplement the predominately mainframe environment with Unix. Unanticipated problems: 1. Were expecting that Sun data servers would handle 100 users running the newly developed application doing concurrent updates. However, end-user response time became unacceptable with only 10 users active per Sun server. 2. At this point, since $millions had been spent on the project already, they replaced the Sun systems with IBM RS/6000's running AIX as an attempt to salvage their already-sizeable investment. They continued to invest many millions of dollars only to learn that the IBM RS/6000's also failed to deliver acceptable performance with 10 users active on a server doing concurrent updates to data. 3. Synchronizing both the centralized mainframes and the distributed Unix environments added an incremental layer of costs that were not anticipated, and were many times more than expected. 4. Reported that Unix systems management, software distribution, and root-cause problem analysis were "nightmares." Project Status: Abandoned. Basically, they looked for creative ways to use the Unix-based hardware from Sun and IBM that was otherwise collecting dust.