The Alert Centre, Englewood CO USA, 1993 - 1996 The Alert Centre (yes they really spelled it that way) was an security systems and alarm monitoring company. The had around 100 concurrent users and ran on 2 redundant Sequoia boxes under Pick OA. Their applications included the normal accounting functions (AP, AR, GL) some work order/ dispatch stuff and of course the core alarm system monitoring and response system. I was there in 1995/96 as a consultant after their entire Pick staff (of 3) quit.
Sometime in 1993 management decided (at the urging of some consultants or another) to convert their existing applications to a relational database. Informix was the chosen platform and Anderson Consulting was selected to design the database. Note here that I phrase this very carefully. Design the database, not the applications, not create the database, just design it. A very impressive design document was produced in just under a year an at the cost of just under a million dollars. A second consulting firm was then chosen to create the database as designed and begin writing the applications in Informix 4gl. Again note that NO changes or improvements to the existing functionality were to be implemented, just a switch to a relational database. During the time I was there they had managed to move the accounts receivable and work order/dispatch modules off of Pick OA at an additional cost of 1.5 million dollars and had completely abandoned the possibility that they would ever convert the alarm monitoring/dispatch system. There were at that time 10 Informix 4gl Programmers (some on staff some consultants) and 4 Informix DBA's and 3 AIX System Administrators. The Informix database was running on 4 IBM RS/6000 480's (one as an application server and 3 as database servers) and the entire database was replicated over 3 machines because of ongoing data integrity problems and an inability to get good tape backups on any single database instance. Shortly after I left in 1996 the company folded and its assets and customer base were sold to SecurityLink. I cant say specificly that the company folded due to an attempt to switch from Pick to Informix because they did alot of other goofy things too, but he drain of capital associated with the meaningless vanity switch of environments certainly contributed to their downfall. ------- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.u2ug.org/listinfo/u2-users
