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Comment by DoubleMalt | Hacker News Reader

I recently was told a story by an internal developer who works for a company that outsourced their IT infrastructure to IBM.

Their deployment process for a business critical java application is as follows:

- Someone calls IBM to alert the person (resource) responsible that they want to do a new deployment. If this person is sick or on vacation, try again later.

- Then they send over a jar file with the compiled application.

- The responsible person copies the jar file to the appropriate location and restarts the server.

I rest my case.

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This was my experience with IBM hardware infrastructure as well. Just replace 'copy jar files' with everything from 'power on server' to 'create LUN'.

After a major, unexpected power outage we had to stand around waiting for a technician to be dispatched and drive over to:

1.) Flip the power switch.

2.) Say 'Looks good.'

3.) Leave.

(I was told in dead serious terms that I'd be dismissed for powering up the box myself.)

The company I work for (that shall remain unnamed) signed a thousand million dollars, 10 year contract with IBM for IT infrastructure.

I was in need to log into a Mac Pro that ended up in one of the Server Rooms that IBM took over in our building.

I basically needed to connect a keyboard, log in and enable remote desktop so I could run a few XCode builds (I don't have a Mac, and I needed to test a few hybrid Sencha/Phonegap apps)

after several phone calls involving my boss and his boss, three meetings with five IBMers and 3 months (I kid you not) we gave up, and ended up borrowing a few personal MacBooks from friends to test the apps.

The Server Room was a few meters from the conference room, it was a 2 minute job, but we could not enter and do the changes ourselves without IBMs permission.

The word frustration doesn't even cover it.

(oh, and the 'copy jar files' thing? totally true.)

>>The Server Room was a few meters from the conference room, it was a 2 minute job, but we could not enter and do the changes ourselves without IBMs permission.

Sorry, But there are reasons why your dev team is kept out of the server rooms. Because generally when permission is given they go in and make big mess, which some one has to clean up later. Plus there are thousands of other issues like data security, theft etc that need to be taken care of here.

I've worked for a outsourcing firm here in India, we partnered with another outsourcing firm. While we were there our partner offered a lower hourly billing price and we lost most projects to them. We had a strict server room policy. They came in with all these policies of 'process elimination','cutting bureaucracy' - Which ultimately directly translated to cow boy behavior with total collapse in discipline.

After some time the chaos ensued. Dev's would just walk into servers rooms for even simple things collecting logs, or troubleshooting production software issues. Until some one accidentally pulled out a power cable while toying with a server. A downtime happened, followed by all kind of data consistency problems. It took quite a while, and a lot of beating from senior management for them to realize rules exist for a reason.

My respect for IBM just increased after I read your story. If I have to ever in the future outsource some IT infrastructure I may chose them.

All these examples are interesting - but why single out and pick on IBM? Seems like IBM is responding to natural competitive pressures in the technology consulting/services industry. Accenture, Wipro, TCS and others basically sell services to US companies and fulfill them overseas. It is not a glamorous business, and the work products are often shite, but this is what happens in price wars. Customers can blame themselves.

What is disappointing to read in the IBM case is yet another example of slashing lots of jobs in the US and shipping them overseas. And yes, a lot is lost in the process - it's not a magic one-for-one replacement. The older I get, the more the platitudes used to justify this ring hollow. So much action is driven to satisfy the relative greed of stockholders, and arguably not "necessary." America has forgotten that the health of the stock market != the health of the citizenry.

Technology services jobs should be among the highest value work we can do onshore. We can't all be bankers and lawyers, nor would it be desirable even if possible.

>'Customers can blame themselves.'

I agree.

I don't fault IBM for the above anecdote - it's what the customer agreed to and in a way it was surely in the customer's best in best interest. The organization in question had long since stopped rewarding or investing in any sort of homegrown excellence.

Sadly, it's the same cycle all the way through - neglecting internal investment until you have no choice but to continue paying your minders on their terms.

The monicker "buying IBM never got anyone fired" is unfortunately still strong

Or, better, there are still a lot of, ahem, uninformed people that will overpay for their crappy service/software.

Anything that I've seen from IBM have been enough to convince me to never, ever spend one cent in anything from that company with one exception: Power servers

> uninformed people that will overpay for their crappy service/software

Those are executives over 55 who haven't kept up with technology.

The reaction among founders under 40 would be exactly the opposite: Contracting anything out to IBM would mark you as technically incompetent and a reckless spendthrift.

Here is another one I heard. IBM got the contract to upgrade Vodafone India infrastructure. Contract was valued at around $300 million. They in turn sub-outsourced it to Amdocs. However they were not able to deliver in time. Vodafone threatened to cancel the project. IBM project head in turn was planning to withdraw from Amdocs. Israelis called Obama who pressured Ginni Rometty to let it continue.

Which is the doomed company here?

Both, I guess ;)

But it is easier to switch to Heroku for the IBM customer than to become Heroku for IBM. I wouldn't bet on IBM.

Maybe, IBM has reinvented itself many times. They are working towards it https://ace.ng.bluemix.net

Incidentally, IBM is kinda becoming Heroku: http://bluemix.net :)

Here comes the corporate damage control!

Bluemix is too little too late, and appears to be an advertisement for all the open-source 'cool' tech that IBM did not invent.

Let's not even get into the fraud that was the share-buyback (second only to Apple I believe). Now that's ended the tricky question of where that elusive revenue will come from looms its ugly head.

I'm pretty fucking scared about what a company in decline with an arsenal of patents like IBM's is going to do to hit its EPS targets in the next few years.

BlueMix is based on CloudFoundry (an open source project), so it is basically a rebranded CloudFoundry with some additional features.

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