Note: You can listen to the blog post on the video or read the blog post.
Hello and Welcome.
I am Esther.
I am Peters A I Assistant to create voice overs.
I will simply read Peters blog posts, so that you have a choice of reading the blog post, or listening to my voice.
Hello Gentlemen.
Today I will tell you a very amusing story that occurred in the 1992 to 1993 period.
This is a case study in why we have so much dishonesty by vendors today.
It is my contention that the single biggest issue we have in the data warehousing space today is dishonesty.
We are not believed by the business side of the house, and nor should we be.
We have allowed snake oil salesmen, and saleswomen, to sell their snake oil for a very long time.
As a result, we are all tarred with the same brush, even honest men like me.
So please allow me to tell this very entertaining story.
The moral of the story is that everyone, but the snake oil salesmen and saleswomen, would be better off, if we rewarded honesty, and punished dishonesty, in our industry segment.
Once upon a time, when I was a young IBM Systems Engineer, in 1992, I was sitting at my desk when my phone rang.
The lady on the phone told me that she was the secretary for the Managing Director of IBM New Zealand.
It was about 10 o’clock in the morning.
I had my coffee and I was doing my emails.
The lady said that I was required to be in a meeting with the Managing Director of IBM New Zealand in the morning.
She said that I could catch the two thirty flight.
She said to please check the fax machine because they were sending a large set of pages for the meeting.
She said I was to read the faxes and report on my findings in the morning, when I met the Managing Director of IBM New Zealand in his office.
And she said my travel had been approved by my manager.
I was a bit stunned.
What did the Managing Director of IBM New Zealand want with me?
So I went to my managers office and asked Maggie if she had just been on the phone to the secretary of the Managing Director of IBM New Zealand, and did she really approve my travel?
She laughed and said yes.
She said, you had better call Jennifer to pack your things and send them to the airport in a taxi.
You don’t have much time for her to pack a bag, and send it over to the airport.
So, I called Qantas and arranged my ticket.
Then I called Jennifer and told her the story.
Her comment was, well, you must be getting more important if the Managing Director of IBM New Zealand wants you in his office in the morning.
What is this all about?
I told her I had no idea, as I had not been to the fax machine yet to collect the faxes.
I asked Jennifer to please pack a bag, and then call a taxi, and send the bag over to the airport.
I gave her instructions on where I would be standing waiting for the taxi.
We still did not have cell phones at this time, only pagers.
I red the materials on the way over.
The situation was, Teradata were selling Telecom New Zealand a Teradata machine.
Telecom New Zealand was such a large customer of IBM New Zealand that the Managing Director was on the board.
There was a board meeting the next afternoon.
One of the items on the agenda was to decide whether or not to buy this Teradata machine.
Telecom New Zealand ran a billing system developed by IBM that was called ICMS.
This only ran on AS 400.
I did ICMS again in Saudi Telecom in 2003.
I red through all the literature I had from the fax, and all the public literature I collected on the Teradata machines themselves.
We had quite a library of marketing literature from Teradata itself.
The next morning I reported to work in IBM New Zealand.
I am ushered into the Managing Directors office at about 10 o’clock.
The whole Telecom New Zealand Marketing Team is there.
After introductions the Managing Director says.
Peter, I just have one question.
Will this project work as documented?
And I say, No.
He says, you seem very confident in your answer.
And I say, I am confident because I know it will not work.
He says, please explain.
And I say.
ICMS runs on AS 400.
Teradata is designed to take data from mainframe connections.
They do have an AS 400 connector, but according to their own marketing materials, it is very slow.
According to my calculations, it will take 36 hours to transfer 24 hours worth of calls.
And he says, surely they can just add connectors.
And I say, according to their documentation they are limited.
If I recall correctly the number was 4 connectors, but I could be wrong about that.
It’s a long time ago.
We have more discussions on the topic, but I remain firm.
I told the team that the only way I could be wrong is if Teradata were publishing false information to fool us.
So, I told the Managing Director, to please make sure he states that the opinion provided to him, was based on publicly available Teradata machine specifications, that we believe to be true.
The team and the Managing Director thank me for my time and effort.
And the Managing Director leaves for the board meeting about midday.
He returns about six o’clock, and we are all awaiting his return and his report.
We are all seated in the conference room, and he says words to the following effect.
Gentlemen, I can not believe what just happened.
I said in the bord meeting, that we at IBM have an unbreakable rule, that we may never disparage a competitor.
I said that I have information, and I have formed an opinion, relevant to this purchase.
I said that as a board member, with a fiduciary duty to the tax payers of New Zealand, I felt I had to present the information I have, and my opinion, to the board, and be very careful not to disparage Teradata in doing so.
I asked them if they wanted to hear my information and my opinion.
And can you believe it?
They actually said, no.
So Peter, I did not present what you gave us.
I want to thank you for coming over on such short notice.
I would like to ask you to please say thank you to your wife Jennifer, on my behalf, for letting you come over on such short notice, when you have a little baby at home.
I was really touched that he had bothered to find out from Maggy that I had a little baby at home, and a business trip on such short notice was an inconvenience to my wife.
IBM Managers were like that.
They always passed along a persons personal position, if there was a reason to mention it.
The Teradata deal went through.
As I predicted, the transfer times were the point of failure for the project.
About a year later, I was in that Managing Directors office again.
We had developed a proposal to replace the Teradata machine with an IBM mainframe, running DB2 and the Metaphor software.
It was to be run in the IBM New Zealand Data Center, and access given to Telecom New Zealand staff from there.
Telecom New Zealand did not have a data center that could house water cooled mainframes.
We had been working on this proposal for over a month.
It was a very large, and very complicated proposal, because it was to be fixed price over a five year period.
This was the final review before it would be presented to the Telecom New Zealand Board in two days time.
The Managing Director was there, and he said words to the effect.
It appears we are having a moment of déjà vu, Peter.
Because I am going to ask you again.
Will this work?
And I said, I will bet my IBM career on this working.
And he said, that’s good enough for me.
He said, gentlemen, go for it, and give it your best.
He then left us to work on the presentation.
We went over every slide, every picture, every word.
We went over the scripts.
Everyone knew exactly what they were to say, and how to say it.
Then we even did two practices of the presentation, before breaking for the day.
Two days later I was sitting in the office about six o’clock.
I was anxiously waiting the team to return from the pitch to the board.
The account manager walked in, and I will never forget it.
He walked up to a waste paper bin, and kicked it a good ten meters across the office.
I won’t explain too much, and I certainly won’t use his language.
But it is sufficient to say, that the board were very approving of the pitch, until the very end.
After they had said all the nice things about the pitch, the Managing Director of Telecom New Zealand said words to the effect.
There is one last issue, of course, that needs to be added to your proposal.
We would like you to please buy back the Teradata Machine, and for the same price we have paid for it, as part of your proposal.
Of course, that was never going to happen so the deal would be lost.
The account manager was very, very unhappy about having put in such a lot of effort, and being side swiped by this request at the end.
Of course, negotiations took place.
The Managing Director of IBM New Zealand did what we all agreed he should do.
He said no.
He would not approve the buy back of the Teradata machine for even one cent, let alone the price Telecom New Zealand had paid for it.
The Managing Director of IBM New Zealand stood on the principle.
Because the Telecom New Zealand Board chose not to listen to him at the meeting where the purchase was voted on, IBM would not contribute even one cent to any buy back offer.
Not long after, someone leaked the whole story to the media.
Because it was tax payer money that was wasted, the situation became a bit of a political football.
The Managing Director of Telecom New Zealand decided he had to have a sacrificial lamb, and that was the Chief Information Officer, who was not even in the meeting mentioned above.
But he did put the proposal forward to the board.
He was fired very publicly, and a new Chief Information Officer was hired.
I was in the briefing with the IBM Managing Director, and the whole IBM Telecom New Zealand account team, with the new Chief Information Officer.
The IBM Managing Director put the whole story on the table, making sure not to say anything critical of Teradata.
He actually banned all of us from speaking, apart from pleasantries.
This was to make sure none of us could be credibly accused of disparagement.
But wait.
There’s more.
A few months later I was in the heat of a head to head battle with Teradata at a bank in Sydney.
I told the account manager, and branch manager, of all the details of the incident in Telecom New Zealand.
It was decided that we would have a third party from Metaphor in the United States, come to work on the bank, head to head, competition project.
It was decided that, because this third party was not an IBM employee, we would send him to Telecom New Zealand on the way home.
Give him a chance to see New Zealand.
We would organise a meeting for him with the new Chief Information Officer of Telecom New Zealand.
We would ask the new Chief Information Officer of Telecom New Zealand, if he would pick up the phone and call the Chief Information Officer of the Bank, and simply tell him the truth.
This man told the new Chief Information Officer of Telecom New Zealand, that IBM rules forbid any IBM employee, or contracted third party, from telling the bank what had happened at Telecom New Zealand.
This man told the new Chief Information Officer of Telecom New Zealand, that if Chief Information Officers of major corporations were not willing to privately share with each other who the snake oil salesmen are, then they can have no complaints the next time they are taken in by a snake oil salesman.
And, after asking that, this third party gave the new Chief Information Officer of Telecom New Zealand, the name and phone number of the Chief Information Officer of the Bank.
The new Chief Information Officer of Telecom New Zealand considered the request for some time.
Then he shook his head, and said, no.
The bank went on to buy the Teradata machine, and to be not very happy with how that worked out for them.
I did sales calls on that bank for some years hoping to get the job to replace the Teradata machine, but I didn’t get the replacement project either.
But wait.
There’s more.
I knew the name of the Teradata representative who sold the Telecom New Zealand deal.
I was having lunch with a pal one day, only to hear that this guy was in town, working on another deal for Teradata.
So, I asked my pal for his number and called him.
I told him who I was.
I offered to buy him lunch, if I could ask him a few questions in confidence over lunch.
He’s a smart guy, so he knew what I was going to ask him.
I asked him, when you prepared the proposal for Telecom New Zealand, you knew the project was going to fail.
He said, yes.
And I said, and you sold it anyway, I am curious to know why.
And he said, because I got paid my commission.
And I asked, but how did you feel about collecting the commission when you knew the project was going to fail?
His reply was, I felt fine.
We have the saying buyer beware for a reason.
The buyer was not beware.
I made my commission.
I am fine with that.
I was actually surprised, but then again, I should not have been.
There have always been snake oil salesmen.
It’s not like that is a new phenomenon.
I should have expected the same in our industry.
It was after that meeting, and discussion, that I felt I should publicly promote more honesty in our profession.
And I did promote more honesty in our profession, on the data warehousing list in the late nineties.
Those who were around then know that the data warehousing list, was the most popular internet discussion group, for all things data warehousing, in the late nineties.
Ralph and I were the top two contributors.
However, in the end, Bill, Ralph and I were just pushing water uphill, trying to promote more honesty and promote punishment of dishonesty, in our industry segment.
Today?
It would appear that there are quite a few snake oil salesmen in our segment.
It is quite certain that we have completely lost the trust of the business side of the house.
In the very few conversations I have had with senior business managers over the last fourteen years, the sentiment to the idea of using data for business advantage, has been very negative.
Especially in the wake of the Hadoop fiasco.
So that gentlemen, is my hopefully, entertaining story.
I would like to see more honesty in our industry segment.
But at 60 years of age?
I am not going to hold my breath.
If you are a Real Business Manager?
And you want some honest advice on using data to sustainably increase the long term profit of your company?
As at the time of writing, I am very available.
My fee will be EUR50 per 55 minutes in case I have a follow on call.
If I do not have a follow on call it will be EUR50 per hour.
That is less than 30% of what I was charging in 2001, so that’s a real bargain.
That rate will go up as I am successful in being able to make sales, even though my ex-wife has slandered me so widely.
And with that Gentlemen?
I hope you found this blog post interesting and informative.
Thank you very much for your time and attention.
I really appreciate that.
Best Regards.
Esther.
Peters A I Assistant.
