30 May 2009
Andy Orrock, Payment systems
Here – presented David Letterman-style – are the Top Ten signs that your legacy payment switch may be ready for replacing:
10. Your programmers are dying. Literally.
9. Ummm, there’s this one guy of yours that really knows the app. But he’s a vice president now. In another division. And he no longer has access to the box. And he really hates it when you call him.
8. You were walking through a museum exhibit called “Relics of Silicon Valley” and – Whoa! There’s our production server!
7. Your software vendor won’t promise even a “Hello, World” application for anything less than nine months and $250,000.
6. You’ve taken to not quoting your yearly hardware and software maintenance costs in meetings (last time you did it, you got audible gasps, drawing in of breath, double-takes, spit-takes, and all that drama…who needs it?)
5. You’ve secretly dropped “intended outages” from your uptime statistics (after all, who really needs to know that it takes you up to three hours to put in an update and cycle the application?)
4. Your programming team launches into long, spirited defenses that often contain lines like “...and what's wrong with COBOL, anyway?!?!?”
3. Your server vendor sold out to another company that, in turn, got bought by another company; your software vendor got bought by its long-time competitor with the unstated but quickly implemented goal of EOL-ing its entire product line.
2. Your marketing group has pretty much given up talking to you because you’re always freaking out about “all these damn ideas for new initiatives and new benefits for our customers.”
…and the Number One sign that your legacy payment switch may be ready for replacing:
1. You secretly hope for the economic destruction of your employer so that nobody will ever find out you can’t handle the projected transaction growth targets.
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