Ducky Paredes

“Shame on IBM for not doing what any other company would have done on Day One: attend to its client’s problem with the IBM software!”

 by Ducky Paredes

If you pay out P80 million for anything, you should have the right to expect that, if something goes wrong with the damned thing that the seller will try to help fix it, right? What you do not expect is that the bum who sold it to you will tell everyone within hearing distance that because he never told you to buy his product, therefore, he is not responsible for any problems that come your way from using it.

That is exactly what is happening in the case of the Government Service Insurance System’s ongoing spat with the giant multinational International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation.

GSIS, after being sold what it considers a “lemon” software by IBM Corporation, now finds itself at the receiving end of a lawsuit by the computer giant — a case of offender having the gall to sue the aggrieved. IBM has chosen to sue the state pension fund instead of doing what it should have done — fixing or replacing its faulty DB2 software which is, at the very least, partly – if not wholly — responsible for fouling up a GSIS IT program.

Sure, the GSIS was the first to file a case vs. IBM, but that damage suit was justified as a last recourse in the face of IBM’s intransigence and refusal to fix the problem. Questronix was the systems integrator that won the bid to implement the GSIS’s ILMAAAMS, (Integrated Loans, Membership, Acquired Assets and Accounts Management System) project of the agency. The project, which cost P80 million, involves developing the agency’s database for all its member services.

And IBM has been avoiding facing the problem that has been traced to IBM’s DB2 software. Imagine that, instead of attending to its client’s problem. My source tells me that IBM first asked for a meeting with GSIS to discuss the problem. But IBM never showed up for the meeting it had set up.

Instead, IBM let GSIS know that it would no longer speak with GSIS because President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo would tell GSIS what it had to do. According to the IBM information given to GSIS, the President would side with them because of IBM’s large investments in the Philippines. What investments?

Instead of talking to GSIS about treating IBM right, however, Gloria actually praised GSIS for its over-all performance as the state pension fund for government workers.

Having failed to pull off its threat of having the President tell off GSIS, IBM next threatened GSIS with a cabinet level person who they would bring to a meeting with GSIS. When the pension fund ignored this threat, IBM then warned that a highly placed Cabinet Secretary would be paying GSIS a visit soon on its behalf if it did not agree on a meeting.

What was getting IBM so antsy?

My GSIS source says that IBM was desperate to stop the world from knowing that IBM’s DB2 software actually sucks big time, despite the testimony of IT workers that the software works well. But, wasn’t the best way to keep GSIS quiet was actually to attend to its complaints about the software. After all, it was no secret that GSIS had been knocking on IBM’s and it, dealer, Questronix to, please, pretty please, fix the problem; so, why didn’t IBM just fix the problem. Then, GSIS would not have had to resort to file a lawsuit against IBM and Questronix. All that GSIS wants is working software so that it can process the claims for their benefits of its members that come in on a daily basis?

Neither IBM nor Questronix can escape responsibility or engage in finger-pointing over the failure of the DB2 software as no less than Questioner’s director for business solution wrote in a May 15 letter to the GSIS that IBM’s laboratory in Ontario, Canada admitted that DB2 was to blame for the problems encountered in the GSIS IT project.

Perhaps, by now, Questronix may have already deleted from its own website a damning admission that confirmed DB2’s being a lemon, despite its marketing hype and overblown claims of technical superiority.

According to the Questronix letter, this was the report of the IBM Ontario:

 “There is a problem in the calculation of a new extent in table spaces larger than two terabytes and with 16 kilobytes page size. Under these conditions, the calculation runs into an overflow. The overflow caused DB2 to lose certain information in the leading byte and data may end up in the wrong table, resulting in subsequent page corruptions.”

Questronix adds: “We are currently awaiting the commitment of IBM Labs when the special build will be available. The fix will make the address of any new extent in such table spaces greater than 2TB with page size of 16K will be calculated correctly, hence not causing page corruption any longer.”

Questronix’s online statement admitted the problem was traced to IBM’s DB2 and not to any other components of the GSIS IT project, while claiming that a “special build was made and installed by IBM” to remedy the problem.

But the problem with DB2 persists to this day and the GSIS’ a conservative estimate of the damage the software had done to the GSIS IT project would amount to no less than P5 billion. If GSIS had chosen to file only a multi-million peso and not a multi-billion peso suit against IBM, it is only because the filing fee in thee civil cases for damages increases exponentially with the amount claimed by the complainant.

Both IBM and Questronix had been trying to make light of the problems caused by DB2, but the March 30 crash of the GSIS IT project caused by the software alone paralyzed 90 percent of GSIS transactions, including claims and loans.

GSIS chief legal counsel Estrella Elamparo put in perspective the damage done by DB2 when she said: “Questronix is bragging about addressing our concerns in a ‘timely fashion’ when it took Questronix nearly two months just to figure out what’s wrong. Two months represent thousands of loans and benefits application on hold.”

To IBM and Questronix, two months may mean a little, but to the millions of GSIS members, they are an eternity considering that what was severely affected by DB2 was the smooth provision by the GSIS of pensions, loans and other benefits to its 1.5 million members.

Something is very wrong when a company like IBM tries to look for a political solution to a technical problem found to be inherent in a very expensive product it sells to governments and corporations. It is good that the GSIS has not allowed itself to be bullied by the giant company despite its name-dropping antics.

Shame on IBM for not doing what any other company would have done on Day One: attend to its client’s problem with the IBM software! Then, there would have been no more problems and no lawsuits.

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hvp 06.27.09)

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