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Technology Stocks : Crystal Systems (CRYSF) - AD 2000 Solution IPO -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ron who wrote (523)	10/8/1998 3:18:00 PM
From: Ron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 572

The European Monetary Union will begin its conversion to the euro currency Jan. 1, 1999, and union countries are scheduled to phase out national currencies in 2004. The euro conversion is the second largest software challenge in the world behind the Y2K problem, said Earl Jones, and it's more sophisticated. Instead of changing every date in a computer system with a single deadline looming, computer systems have to be able to handle the different ways the 11 union countries change over. Further complicating the problem are individual companies that may convert completely to conducting business in euros, or they may continue to track their national currency while simultaneously using the euro. Ed Severs, chief operating officer for ADPAC Inc., one of the older companies designing mainframe computer systems, said there aren't enough programmers to finish both the euro conversion and the Y2K fix. Jones said about 10 million programs, ranging from Microsoft's spreadsheet software, Excel, to specialized financial tracking software, would have to be modified to handle the euro conversion. France and Germany, said Gary Fisher, a computer scientist at Information Technology Laboratory at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, are putting all their resources into converting to the euro instead of Y2K. ''They're in a fix, I think,'' he said. ''They're going to be fighting fires everywhere.'' The euro conversion could cost between $150 billion and $400 billion spread among the 11 union countries, said Severs. Jones agreed and said 70 percent of the cost likely would be borne by the union countries, with the rest falling on companies around the world that deal with the union and track European currencies. 'If you're a financial institution (doing business in Europe), you're going to spend between three and five times what you did on Y2K,'' said Severs.