Enron Broadband under the gun
Some interesting Enron trial news:
Enron Internet executives sought another company’s network to sell broadband services on because their own was incapable of delivering such services, a former computer troubleshooter for the company testified Friday.
[snip]
Enron’s network, at the time, could not direct “traffic” or track customers because it did not have the necessary software, Bloomer said in his second day of testimony.
I was the architect and programmer of an important piece of this “necessary software” when the company suddenly folded in 2001. In a period of one week Enron Broadband Services went from hyper-growth to hyper-layoffs. I stayed about a month longer than most of the consultants at EBS because I think they were still hanging on to the hope that one of the big deals they had going could be salvaged. In which case they would need the piece of software I was working on, which was called “Deal Launch”. Heh, heh. Kinda hard to launch a big broadband deal without the piece of software called deal launch, huh?
Funny thing is that the software was basically completed according to the original specification, except the daily meetings kept changing the spec. In other words, they hadn’t quite figured out how to do what it was they needed to do in order to pull off one of these deals if it did land. The last piece and most crucial part of the deal launch puzzle was how to capture and log the actual metrics from the physical execution of the deal, ie, the transmission of content through the EBS network, and compare them against the contractual terms of the service level agreement (SLA) captured in the deal launch database.
We are talking about millions of pieces of information recorded from routers and other network devices for parameters such as latency, throughput, packet lost, etcetera. Very complex, but straightforward in my opinion, which I was giving to them in four hour doses every day in never-ending meetings. Unfortunately for them, they just ran out of time. That last week I was there, it was like walking around in the catacombs of some modern day pharaoh.
Which seems an appropriate analogy for the demise of one of the world’s largest, nongovernmental pyramid schemes ever foisted on society.