IBM ordered to pay $105 million to insurer over tech project's collapse IBM must pay five times more in compensation to a customer whose £175 million ($230 million) Agile software platform contract was ripped up in 2017 following a series of failures on the project, the Court of Appeal in England has ruled. The legal spat between Big Blue and the client, formerly known as CIS General Insurance Ltd …
Sales people are/were pushed/intimidated ( insert your own verbs and tense here ) to sell what execs said was deliverable .
a ) the sole exec motivation was their bonus
b ) the rep got screwed in the commissions
After a few such iterations , IBM was inadvertently actively "training" ( in the Pavlovian sense ) sales people to sell stuff "undeliverable" , Besides , the reps wouldn't be compensated anyway .
They pretend to "lead" , we pretend to "follow" .
I'd say : "working as designed"
Now ,,, as for the moronity of the designer ... that's another story . What was her name again ?
"selling what can't be delivered."
There is some truth to this. One our our sales teams sold a solution to a Govt Dept that was really convoluted and difficult to manage, and nobody would touch it,... so my team got lumbered with it. I hated looking after that environment. No data was allowed to leave, and we were not allowed to use any of our tooling or automation, so everything was done manually.
Also "I Bring Many"
I did some work with IBM about 10 years back when they were reselling our product.
We had a meeting at IBM South Bank to run over a few technical details. 1 person from the customer, 2 from my company and EIGHTEEN (yes, really!) from IBM.
Nice pastries TBF.
Because El Reg now sees a *lot* of traffic from the US too? I believe it's been explained by editorial staff before when people have had a strop in a similar vein. I of course *would* prefer headline figures in the Queen's money, but hey, this is the price of success when El Reg becomes *so* good that the Yanks like to read the IT news with added British snark. ;-)
Now I am no lawyer, but I have been told repeatedly that English law does not allow for damages beyond actual losses.
So what's going on here ? Or is this another example of one law for the big boys, and no law for us plebs ?
Incidentally, when I was working on a project with CIS, it stood for Cunts In Suits. Many site visits to Manchester to confirm my colleagues point of view.
I think that the appeal judge decided that
a) The insurance company bought stuff to use with the IBM software that didn't arrive
b) Some of that stuff could not be used with any other system
c) Therefore the cost of the subset of stuff that could not be repurposed could be added to the loss figure as 'wasted expenditure'
d) The clause in the original contract that IBM claimed disallowed 'wasted expenditure' from their liability for non-completion in fact didn't.
PS: Was it IBM that appealed against the original judgement?
" I have been told repeatedly that English law does not allow for damages beyond actual losses."
A) that's something of an oversimplification. There is stuff that says what can be claimed, but no overarching statement of what cannot be. Direct consequences of something vs indirect consequences is a grey area. But just for example, if you're injured and can't do your job, you can get compensation for the injury and for lost earnings - but not for the higher wages you expected to get once you'd found a new job, which you were planning to do before you got injured.
B) these were actual (directly consequential) losses, according to this court case.
As reported in the article the judgement was clear that the contractual exclusion clauses were insufficient to exclude costs incurred directly as a result of IBM's failure to provide appropriately working software. The reason for the precise costs awarded was because the claimant had invoices and could prove exactly how much they had lost.
Don’t slay me, you all know my hate for IBM from my posts here. Wonder if a fly on the wall would say that IBM actually sold what the customer originally asked for, but then didn’t manage scope creep?
Probably not, given it’s IBM. But I have to ask given I’ve walked in and “fired a customer” multiple times with $20-90M project only revenues. We had to pay penalties, but they were much lower than losses from pizzing into the wind, or a lawsuit like this one.
Don’t slay me, you all know my hate for IBM from my posts here. Wonder if a fly on the wall would say that IBM actually sold what the customer originally asked for, but then didn’t manage scope creep?
Probably not, given it’s IBM. But I have to ask given I’ve walked in and “fired a customer” with $20-90M project only revenues. We had to pay penalties, but they were much lower than losses from printing into the wind, or a lawsuit like this one.
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