IBM embroiled in dispute over banking outage in Singapore

When in doubt, always blame the vendor. Big name technology vendors are accustomed to being thrown--or perhaps merely shoved--under the bus by clients. But rarely do these sorts of disputes explode into public view. In Singapore, DBS Bank suffered a massive systems failure, as its Internet banking, ATM, credit card and payment services were crippled for up to seven hours, creating loads of terrible publicity.

It wasn't long before the media zeroed in on its main technology vendor IBM (IBM news). Questions were raised about the whole idea of outsourcing, "and whether the incident could have been averted had DBS kept the maintenance of its technology infrastructure in-house." Of course, vendors can perform many core functions much better than a client ever could. That's why contracts get signed. But in the hothouse of a meltdown, fingers end up getting pointed.

In this case, there's another easy target, mainframe computers. It's easy to pin these computers as dinosaurs, when in reality, the IBM mainframes have been re-tooled for modern computing. They remain quite popular in banking. In any case, now that IBM has been embroiled in the DBS meltdown it may have to answer some tricky questions as to why. Some say a witch-hunt is underway. 

For more:
- here's an article

Related Articles:
Sordid tale: The IBM exec and the hedge fund analyst
Outsourcing trends to watch for
IBM, other vendors eye overseas markets
How much can you outsource?