Someone Points

Time seemed to fly while Kent was gone, given all of the work he had dumped on Margret when he left. Naturally he didn’t take anything off her plate when he got back. He had been back from his trip for a few weeks now. Margret and Kathryn had informed him about the issue with backup media and recovery time. For a small additional contract Kathryn’s company had partnered with another Indian company that provided much the same service as Iron Mountain. They had agreed to keep the annual fee below that of Iron Mountain and Margret had arranged for all of the backup media from the migrated sites to be shipped to the new location once Kent had signed the contract.

This was one of those things which absolutely baffled Kent. Then again, nearly everything to do with technology baffled Kent; hence, he was made Director of IT. He had no concept of backing up or recovery. He did have a concept of the FDIC regulation Margret presented to him and knew violation of any requirement would cost him his career if anyone found out and the bank lost its insurance. Kent quickly signed the contract and Margret got the shipments going.

Now alone with Kathryn, Kent brought up his new project. He had already received the spreadsheets with the estimated effort for data conversion, and Margret had already worked up estimated hours for adding the additional banking rules to the central system. Even using both consultants and employees it was going to take a long time just to get the French banking rules in place, let alone the other countries’. Kent didn’t have a budget for consultants and didn’t want word of this to get out. He needed a method of getting this done right around the time his two year stint was over in IT, and he needed to get rid of most of the programmers once it was completed.

Kathryn smiled to herself. “I may have a solution for you, Kent. There is a new comprehensive banking software product coming out from Pytho Corporation. They currently have U.S. And Canada banking rules audited and certified. They are also working on every other country you do business in. I can get you some product literature in a couple of days. Nobody knows about this product yet as they aren’t finished with the globalization effort, but it should be completed in another four to six months.”

Kent sat there dumbfounded. Finally he asked, “What does it cost? Will it run on our existing machines? How many of the existing machines can be eliminated?” At this point he realized he was talking like a little boy trying to get a girl to show hers to him for the first time and he shut up.

Kathryn responded that they hadn’t settled on pricing yet, though Kent would be able to eliminate all but two of the existing machines at the off-site locations once the data center migration had completed. She informed him that he would need to train and keep only two developers to handle any additional reporting needs of the bank as the vendor had a support staff for the product. If any deal was put together, the bank would need to make some kind of public statement saying they were moving to the software. This could be as simple as Kent giving an interview in one of the weekly trade magazines and answering a few questions during a phone call from a Langston Group analyst.

“A rough estimate would be four months for them to complete certification and one month for each system migration. You could install and begin conversion using the U.S. And Canadian systems this month if you wanted. As new countries are added you would receive software upgrades and each country’s migration could occur piecemeal. At the end of another six months or so, you could have every location running this software, lose at least twelve machines at the off-site locations, and skip having to migrate the last three data centers. Once completed, you could eliminate all of your IT staff except the two developers you should keep and one or two operator people to walk reports around if management refuses to pick up their own. It should dramatically slash your costs.”

“So, you are saying I will go from a staff of over sixty to a staff of four inside of a year?” asked Kent.

“Inside of six months if all proceeds according to plan,” replied Kathryn. “According to the numbers we had for the data center offshoring project, you were spending $16 million per year on IT expenses and personnel salaries. Once this is complete I will wager that your annual IT expense falls below $4 million. Do they give promotions for saving $12 million per year?”

Kent simply smiled. Once again he had bought the white elephant.

Margret soon returned to the room and the rest of the meeting was spent going over the progress of the data center migration and its numbers. So far, every machine they had abandoned had been sold, though not for as much as they had hoped at the start of the project. Still, one data center had been sold for much more than they planned, three more had offers at or near list, and they had to pay a pair of lease termination fees or find a company to sublet two others. The New York data center was now in the middle of a three-way bidding war and was going to close later this week for four times the original asking price if the machines were left in place. The rest had not been put on the market yet. All in all, things were progressing smoothly. Even Margret was somewhat surprised.

Kent chose that moment to inform Margret of the new system from Pytho and the plan to move all of the locations onto it. Margret was a bit defensive at first and pointed out she had filed such a consolidation plan with Kent’s predecessor. She could tell by the look in Kent’s eye that the white elephant had just been sold. She even assumed that Kathryn had told Kent he would be able to get rid of Margret once the new system migration was completed.

Kathryn tried to mollify the situation by stating Pytho had hundreds of developers working on this and several leading auditing firms providing the certification. The time frame for them to deliver all of the countries was measured in months, not years, a it would have been using internal staff and consultants. Margret was very aware “time frame” was the operative phrase for Kent. His two-year tour would be up around the time this project completed and he was looking for a major promotion.

The meeting ended with Kathryn agreeing to put together the sale numbers and a timeline for rollout. There wouldn’t be a data center migration this month anyway due to the end of quarter happening. It would be a good time to have a presentation to the board since they would have just jumped through all of the hoops to validate numbers from various banking systems.
 
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You are reading a special promotional version of “Infinite Exposure” containing only the first 18 chapters. This is the first book of the “Earth That Was” trilogy. You can obtain the entire trilogy in EPUB form from here:


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