Posted on 06/24/2015 2:07:13 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Navy will pay more than $9 million to keep using Windows XP under a contract signed this month, Computerworld reported Tuesday.
The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) will pay Microsoft $9,149,000 through the contract, which was approved earlier this month. It could eventually grow to be as large as $30,842,980 by 2017.
The funds will pay for Microsoft to provide custom security support to up to 100,000 Windows XP machines used by the Navy. Microsoft has abandoned supporting the system for users who don’t pay for the custom services. The contract will also provide support for other older Microsoft products, including Office 2003. "Nearly all the networks and workstations afloat and ashore will benefit from the Microsoft Premier Support services and Microsoft Custom Support services for Windows XP, Office 2003, Exchange 2003 and Server 2003,” said a spokesman for SPAWAR.
He said the Navy is developing plans to modernize its infrastructure, but that until "those applications and programs are modernized or phased out, this continuity of services is required to maintain operational effectiveness."
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
That’s not entirely un-reasonable. Hopefully the Navy can get some migration support in that sum a well.
Active Duty ping.
When I worked, I was employed by a large bank that employed 260,000 people.
Our migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 took three years, and involved tens of thousands of custom applications and vendor products. It was very painful for everyone, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
I don’t even have words anymore to question how our country has reached this point.
I worked a bank gig as well for quite a while doing S0laris/HPUX —> linux migration. I know of what you speak (our price tag was a bit less however; we had 1200 UNIX machines to migrate off of and it was mostly DB hosting).
I worked with a UNIX SA who did 8 years in the Navy supporting HPUX. The guy was sharp as a razor and entirely trained by the Navy. I have faith in them..
This has been repeated almost everywhere in the corporate world.
The question is: why hasn't the Navy been on top of this? The end-of-life for Windows XP has been known for years, and expected for long before that.
They need to migrate to Linux. Hell the NSA has their own version they can use. For all the money they’re spending, they could hire their own coders.
Yes! They should have been prepared to immediately switch to Windows 8!
/s
I tried to tell some that XP Pro was the one operating system that DOD contractors felt was the most secure.
They'd all have to be AA hires.
Or better yet, Muslim outreach guys. Maybe even the ChiComs.
“Hell the NSA has their own version they can use.”
Seriously - how many people would use this????
They probably couldn’t get the budget approved - that’s the usual problem.
At my bank, we had a lot of trouble because all costs were charged back to the end users. Non-technical groups did want to cough up millions of dollars on their P&L statements to pay for an upgrade. We had to tell them that if they didn’t pay, their applications would be discontinued.
A surprisingly large number of applications were discontinued, as users discovered they were not as vital as they had thought....when they were faced with paying the bill!
Yeah, I seen similar horror stories. I have also seen migrations to Linux (small insurance firm) that was far less painful.
Back in the early 2000’s I read that the Navy was upgrading some computers on Aegis equipped destroyers as the Navy couldn’t get their hands on enough 286 CPU’s too keep up with attrition.
I wouldn’t. But hey, another government agency. They’re already in bed together, more or less, so why not.
No big surprise.
64 bit XP tromps everything on the horizon by a cloud and a half.
.
The actual migration went pretty well, after three years of planning, regression testing, and fixing problems. About 99.9% of the stuff that was supposed to work did.
I turned in my XP laptop, received my Win7 laptop, and was running in a few hours. You got your favorites in the browser, all your mail was there, and the standard applications deployed themselves perfectly.
I am not a “Windows” guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have to say XP just “ran and ran and ran”. It was (and is IMO) a good product. Dated? Yeah, but its not like the Navy is buying fancy “new” devices left and right from BestBuy.
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