Everyone’s favourite fruit company scares the pants off me
I have always said that if you cut off one of my appendages I would bleed a rainbow (or a translucent shade of the colour blue – to keep it current) that’s how deep it runs in my veins, however my faith has been quivering somewhat this month as I find out more about their software. Superficially it is great and very pretty however deep underground there is trouble afoot.
I feel part of my job is to promote the use of their products around the company – everyone plays favourites after all and so I therefore sometimes go out on a limb a little and paint a nice rosy picture, in the faith that by the time we look at the product in question they would have made it work correctly and all would be cool.
We have been trying to find a way of making a directory service and associated network home directories work for our workstations on various back-end systems. The one we know works, the manufacturers own system, is not trusted by various elements among us (System Architect), so we have been looking for alternatives. First came the “solar” solution, and after about a year it was discovered that, due to reasons I can’t be bothered to explain, it just would not work. Incidentally we told them so – repeatedly, but the *nix guys refused to listen.
Now we are looking at an alternative system so when a representative from the “fruit temple” comes in with his consultant and states categorically that their software will work with our main enterprise middleware product, we were inclined to believe them – it would be fantastic and, well, they should know right?
Well it didn’t work and still doesn’t seem to when we built it again. At the moment my reaction is “Oh crap. We bet the farm on this one, it was the last option on the list.”
At this point I thought it best not to order the £90k of equipment poised to be purchased off the project budget and tell everyone to wait while we looked into it.
Said consultant is coming to work on site for a couple of days (at our expense) so we shall see next week, although I shall not hold my breath.