LinuxHam's Journal: Ignorance is Bliss

About 18 months ago, IBM and HP were in a tight battle to acquire AT&T's desktop support group (PDS). HP won out. Well, within the last couple weeks, some former AT&T'ers noticed that 27,000 desktops are vulnerable to various attacks against systems running Microsoft OSes and applications. Someone else ran their own script and determined that the 27,000 figure was off to the high side by 18,000. They are now scrambling nationwide trying to figure out how to patch somewhere between 9,000 and 27,000 desktops. Carly will be notified on Wednesday about this problem since it will cost the AT&T support project a few million $ they were never expecting to spend (and can't pass thru to AT&T).

So the best minds on the project had a meeting over the weekend, and what did they decide was the culprit behind letting up to 27,000 desktops go unpatched? It was due to the Tivoli management environment that was installed years ago, but never updated. That's right, it has nothing to do with piss-poor Enterprise Systems Mangaement policies and procedures. It has nothing to do with the fact that HP didn't do their due diligence when fighting tooth-and-nail to acquire this support group. When HP and AT&T personnel are at the table and Carly's direct-reports are asking "WTF?", blame IBM. That's the best they could come up with. At that rate, their problems will never be solved.

With that head-in-the-sand attitude, I'm glad IBM didn't get that support group, and its no wonder that AT&T is in the f*ckedcompany.com hall of shame. Some people.