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From Slashdot IT Story | The Perils of Ramming Products Down IT’s Throat

Re:Rant (Score:5, Interesting)

by SatanicPuppy (611928) * <Satanicpuppy@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Monday September 21, @05:29PM (#29496869)
Journal

Here’s the best/worst example I’ve ever seen.

I used to work for a company that had a huge managed information infrastructure built up of a number of XML feeds from various business units that went through a custom, in-house, processing system, were categorized, databased, and aggregated out to various parties. The in house system was huge and idiosyncratic, but it worked. There were a number of people (2) who maintained it, and were well paid.

So the old company gets bought by the new company, and the new company derides the old system as worthless, fires all the developers, and discontinues the use of the code. The developers ask for, and are granted, the right to open source the code (who’s going to want it, right?)

So the new company shops around to a bunch of third party people, and finds someone who is willing to take on the whole infrastructure for a nice low price. Managers are patting themselves on the back so hard they’re getting shoulder problems, “This is so much better than that old crap system HA HA HA!”

Well, as I “migrate” all my information stuff it quickly becomes clear that no one at the new 3rd party company understands their processing software, but that all our old codes, all our weird categorizations…All that stuff still works. Well, that’s damn peculiar.

The old processing system used to send back an acknowledgement if you sent it a certain series of codes, telling you receipt time, process time, etc, etc. So I sent up the codes, and got back a response, complete with software version information. Fuckers had taken our OWN CODE and SOLD IT BACK TO US, and like a bunch of morons, the goddamn PHBs had PAID for it!

There is a tendency to trust a 3rd party just because you don’t know the problems they’re having. Be wary, however, that they don’t just turn around and make you pay for what you already had for free.

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