The Daily WTF

Zak S worked for a retailer which, as so often happens, got swallowed up by Initech’s retail division. Zak’s employer had a big, ugly ERP systems. Initech had a bigger, uglier ERP and once the acquisition happened, they all needed to play nicely together.

These kinds of marriages are always problematic, but this particular one was made more challenging: Zak’s company ran their entire ERP system from a cluster of Solaris servers- running on SPARC CPUs. Since upgrading that ERP system to run in any other environment was too expensive to seriously consider, the existing services were kept on life-support (with hardware replacements scrounged from the Vintage Computing section of eBay), while Zak’s team was tasked with rebuilding everything– point-of-sale, reporting, finance, inventory and supply chain- atop Initech’s ERP system.

The project was launched with the code name “Cold Stone”, with Glenn as new CTO. At the project launch,

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