The Million-Dollar Mistake

A major project had just been approved: a collaboration between several partners, with a generous budget to set up new infrastructure. One partner was in charge of purchasing the servers and hosting them in their datacenter. The plan was simple: coordinate with everyone, agree on the specifications, and move forward together.

Well… that last part didn’t happen.

Without consulting anyone, the partner decided to order high-end IBM proprietary Big Data servers, proudly announcing the purchase once it was too late to change anything. 💸

The result? The machines looked impressive, cost a fortune… but were completely unusable for the project.

We did, however, get a nice guided tour of the datacenter, with big shiny racks labeled “Funded by the project”. Beautiful to look at, completely useless in practice.

In the end, the partner had to provide a new infrastructure at their own expense, and the project finally moved forward… just a few months late.

Sometimes, “coordination” really is the most valuable hardware you can invest in. 😅