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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbn3 who wrote (34753)	3/18/1998 9:16:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

most of the y2k problem is not in the hardware but in the software, and most of that is older COBOL programs written with 2 digit date codes, and the huge base of data still in older ISAM databases using proprietary (and non-y2k compliant) date formats. Companies who choose to solve this problem by converting and replacing the whole of the infrastructure with HW and SW which is y2k compliant are few and far between - because that in effect means rewriting core mission critical systems. The big problem has been a lack of program talent to do the job, since there is not a growing pool of MVS COBOL programmers, and this would seem to be a kind of dead-end career path (kind of hard to apply the skills once the y2k problem is solved). There will probably be a good market for new systems for the company who has the underlying programming and systems expertise, especially as the pressure builds over the next 18 months, but the trend in the last year has been more and more to apply 'band-aid' fixes to existing systems. In this respect IBM and CPQ (with DEC) are much better positioned to take advantage of this situation than Dell. But it is starting to look like the y2k issue will not be a windfall for any of the HW vendors, as IT departments reallocate systems expenditures to emergency programming fixes instead of HW improvements.