Pyrrhic victory: Co-Op wins £13m from IBM over collapse of £175m Project Cobalt insurance platform contract Co-Op Insurance has successfully sued IBM for £13m in England over a £175m Agile software platform contract which collapsed in 2017 after a litany of failures by Big Blue and its subcontractor 1insurer. High Court trial judge Mrs Justice O'Farrell ruled that both IBM and Co-Op had contributed to the project's collapse, though …
Yup. One project I was on needed extra resources. Despite this being a long term project, it was decided to bring in an outsourcer who claimed to have deep experience of developing Java applications to run on a Unix platform.
On the day the work commenced we discovered the outsourcer's developers were novice VB and C# developers who had never used any operating system other than Windows. Thankfully, after six months we were able to get out of the contract by showing them to be in breach of it.
Back in the noughties when I worked for an ISP, we were planning deploying our first Windows Active Dirctory infrastructure, and we looked at implementing Cisco dynamic DNS at the top level. The 'expert' arrived, with a photcopied version of the manual, never having installed the product previously. He wasn't even on prem long enough to sample the free tea and coffee.
... customer wasn't blameless for debacle, rules UK High Court.
Hmmm ...
They chose IBM to build a new, essential software platform to manage their business?
Of course they are not blameless.
They are the only ones to blame.
Another case of lack of due diligence?
O.
"IBM is also pleased that the judgment reduced CISGIL's inflated damages claim to a fraction of what was claimed recognising the contractual allocation of risks "
I'm thrilled that IBM is pleased about the reduction of the payment and totally disregards the damage that this case has done to its reputation.
Although, given the current state of its reputation, I guess the damage isn't all that bad after all.
I just wonder what skill sets IBM is looking for when hiring for this
Well, I suggest there are 5 senior people at Nominet who will be on the jobs market shortly and would fit right in. Snap them up IBM, before someone else does! They're "experienced" and "highly skilled"!
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