$100 Million Amount invested: $100M Organization: Major insurance company Original Plans: To replace a central mainframe system with an HP distributed client/server Unix solution. The objectives were to improve customer service, to lower IT costs and most importantly to handle the increased business volumes expected in this era of takeovers/mergers and booming financial services business. Unanticipated problems: The advice from the software and hardware suppliers was to implement a very small pilot application in some smaller locations to get users 'comfortable' with the new systems. This pilot had only five or six users maximum and was implemented with little problem. However as this application was 'enhanced' and moved out to larger locations a major problem arose. Scalability was not linear. For ten users almost four times the capacity was required compared to the pilot system and for 50 users the required capacity had increased by a factor of twenty-five! At the 100 user level, which was required in some locations, there was no available system that could meet the capacity requirements. It was apparent that the planned business growth could never be handled with this solution and also they had learned that their business was really centralized anyway. The annual cost estimate for this Unix-based application had also grown from around $1B to at least $5B compared to the mainframe budget of around $1.5B. Project Status: The project was scrapped with no applications retained from the Unix environment, and the mainframe capacity was increased to handle the increased workloads.