$100 Million Plus Amount invested: $100M Plus Organization: Motor Vehicle Licensing Agency Original Plans: To replace a mainframe system with a client/server system (Sequent/Unix) to "lower the costs of computing". Unanticipated problems: The application could not support more than 50 users with an 'acceptable' response time of 10-15 seconds. With 100 users online this frequently increased to minutes. The supplier, scrambling for some type of solution, actually put data integrity at risk by convincing the customer to remove record-locking protection on updates. Their rationale was that "it's a one in a million chance of two users accessing the same record simultaneously." After this change the response time improved to 10-15 seconds for up to 100 users, but still increased rapidly thereafter. The problem is that as they issue around 3 million licenses per year the "one in a million" chance actually occurs about three times per year when duplicate licenses are issued to different vehicles. Project Status: The mainframe was finally replaced, some three years later than expected, but the user still uses an outsourcing firm to run and maintain their legacy mainframe applications, at a cost close to the original total mainframe cost! The eventual budget for the replacement system was three times the old mainframe budget and six times the anticipated cost. In addition there has been a 50% increase in clerical staff to handle the same volume of transactions.