Y2K consultants on hot seat

By Paul McNamara
Network World, 08/10/98

Customers are buying costly third-party solutions for Year 2000 glitches in Dell servers and PCs that the company insists can be fixed for free.

Other hardware vendors, most notably Compaq, and Year 2000 experts have voiced similar skepticism about some consultants' Year 2000 fixes. Last week, a spokesman for National Software Testing Laboratory (NSTL) called the tactics of these Year 2000 consultants "ethically wrong" and "a disservice."

"They're just here to make the quick buck," said Mark Paxson, manager of design verification for NSTL. "There are a lot of Year 2000 companies that are doing this, and it's having a significant impact."

However, one of the reported offenders, a British company called Prove It 2000, vehemently disputed such characterizations. CEO Richard Coppel accused PC makers of trying to whitewash problems in their products and accused the NSTL of providing the paint.

"We can prove that we're right, and we can prove that our products work," said Coppel, who counts the British Defense Ministry and Philips among his company's customers. "All Dell can do is come back and say that they have a fix that you can download that still leaves a [Real Time Clock] component in their machine returning a date of 1900" on Jan. 1, 2000.

IT managers grappling with Year 2000 problems appear to be divided on the matter, at least according to interviews and newsgroup chatter.

While there are multiple layers to the dispute, here is the crux:

Every server and PC that Dell has shipped since Jan. 1, 1997, is Year 2000 compliant in accordance with the widely used YMARK2000 test from the NSTL, the company said. (Compaq relies on the same test.) As for older machines, BIOS upgrades and patches needed to achieve compliance are available for free on the Dell Web site.

What is not Year 2000 compliant in Dell machines or in the vast majority of those from other vendors is the Real Time Clock (RTC), a chip that the BIOS accesses to get its time and date information. However, a Year 2000-compliant BIOS is all that's necessary, Dell insisted, because the BIOS will correct any noncompliant data provided by the clock. The NSTL concurred with this judgment.

Prove It 2000 and some customers disagreed.

Having a component that returns a date of 1900 in the year 2000 is not irrelevant, Coppel said. "For probably 85% to 90% of computer users it won't make a difference. But for 10% to 15% it will make a very significant difference," he said.

Time-sensitive applications, such as those found in manufacturing plants, would be most susceptible to these problems, Coppel said. All parties agree that trouble will arise primarily in instances in which an application bypasses the BIOS to access the RTC directly.

Where they part company is over the likelihood and the consequences of this occurring.

The vendors said tests on more than 1,000 off-the-shelf software programs have failed to turn up even one application that bypasses the BIOS. However, Prove It 2000 argued that others undoubtedly do bypass the BIOS and that such tests are meaningless when applied to custom-built applications.

Customers such as Stuart Greenfield, an analyst in the Comptroller of Public Accounts department for the state of Texas, clearly prefer to err on the side of caution.

"To me, Year 2000 compliant is a binary decision: It is or it isn't," he said. "And if the RTC is not Year 2000 compliant then it isn't, even though the manufacturers say no applications should write to the RTC."

The real issue is money, not technology, Greenfield added. Vendors don't want to shell out the money to address RTC problems, given the competitive nature of the market, he said.

David Cunningham, Dell's program manager for Year 2000, insisted that saving money for Dell customers is the company's prime concern.

"I probably get four or five calls a week from major corporations or large organizations that are getting these tests that show that their systems fail," Cunningham said. "Of course, the people who provide those tests always have a fix that they offer to sell."

Dell believes these third-party fixes to be "absolutely unnecessary," he added.

According to a recent Gartner Group study, companies are devoting 7% of their Year 2000 budgets to paying consultants.

Cunningham recounted a case in which a company paid $15,000 up front, plus $100 per machine, to have 150 computers tested and fixed. The "fix" did nothing more than produce an acceptable test result, he claimed.

"None of that had to be spent," he said. The customer, as one might expect, declined an offer to speak publicly about the matter.

Dell expects the issue of questionable fixes to grow as time for addressing Year 2000 problems ticks away.

"If organizations haven't done their due diligence to this point, you're going to see the red button hit, and when you're in a panic mode you have a tendency to grab at anything," Cunningham said. "We'll be seeing a lot of that.