Cap Gemini cautions against Y2K over-optimism

It will be weeks and months before IT directors and businesses can say the Y2K problem is over and done with, a senior executive at major consultancy Cap Gemini warned today. Harry Blakey, UK divisional director of Cap Gemini's Y2K unit, said that his company had expected few problems at the point when the 20th century became the 21st century. His company, like many others around the world, has had a team in place over the weekend to watch out for incipient problems. Blakey said: "It's been immensely boring, but we've been pleasantly bored. We weren't expecting huge problems at the rollover stage." However, he warned against complacency. "The clock shift in hardware is only part of the process and we'll run tests to at least the end of January and probably until the end of February." Some business processes will need monitoring until the end of this year, he added. "What we've seen so far is very, very few Y2K problems that even registered on the radar," he said. "Most are little glitches." Blakey said that the glitches it has found over the weekend have not been business critical and "peripheral to many business processes". He also said that the fear of Y2K virus problems looks, so far at least, not as big a problem as anticipated. Many large firms have shut down their email system over the new year as a precaution against problems arising. The real testing time will come when businesses start next week. Monday is a Bank Holiday in the UK, so systems, particularly applications, will be put under real test conditions the day afterwards. "When application systems are put under full load, it won't be 100 per cent," he warned. Everyone had seemed to think that the rollover period was the real test, but that was not the case. ® See also Microsoft, Gigabyte, Futurists get bugged by Y2K Lloyds of London, Met Office follow Railtrack in hack attack