| Amount invested: |
$200M plus |
| Organization: |
Subsidiary of major oil company |
| Original Plans: |
To replace their central mainframe system with a full
distributed Unix client/server system running SAP applications. |
| Unanticipated problems: |
The application implementation period was well
over three times the initial estimate and the package costs increased
four-fold due to the more powerful servers required even at the pilot
stage. The support staff were also increased substantially from the initial estimates
with expertise required at each location. The SAP skills required were in
short supply forcing the users to pay much larger salaries with a negative
effect on the existing staff who left almost 'en mass' before the mainframe
systems were decommissioned. Despite the high salaries, most of the SAP
skilled personnel moved on after a very short period, causing more
disruption and delays. As the application nears completion it is obvious
that no Unix server yet built can handle the volumes of the larger sites,
and multiple servers just increase response times as the database is
distributed still further.
|
| Project Status: |
The user is recentralizing and 'porting' the database part
of the application back to the mainframe and will ultimately move it back
to DB2 as the Unix database being used requires over three times the DASD
capacity and as much as ten times the processor capacity to do the same
job. The current cost estimate for the mainframe is under 50% of the Unix
cost for a system that didn't even work |
