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The Compaq acquisition was a calculated move. Few people know it also covered all DEC VAX which at the time was still in use by banks and govts.

I won't say who, but the bank I work for had six DEC VAX machines clustered across two data centers as recently as May of 2008.

Yes, I know --- that's a full 14 years or so after damn' near everyone else got off of them.

HP charged the bank I work for almost $1,000,000/yr for a hardware and software support contract on a device that they could no longer obtain parts for themselves. The bank then paid just about another $750k/yr for "consultants" to baby sit the damn' thing. That's literally all they did.

I started working at the bank I'm currently at in March of 2007. My role when I started was to develop and implement a technology risk framework for the hardware, software and applications the bank ran. That technology risk framework had five major categories, one of which was "brand/reputation damage" and the other was "regulatory/compliance."

Within 30 days of introducing the framework (which I'd developed and published prior to working at this bank) I obtained funding to eliminate the DEC VAX platform and the 135 applications that still ran on it because someone finally told the bank in real terms, what would happen to their reputation if it ever came to light that an outage or loss of customer information/funds happened because of a platform they should've retired 14 years prior, they'd lose customers and face the regulator's wrath.

The entire project to retire the damn' thing was $1.65 million and took 8 months to complete. That meant the project paid itself off almost immediately upon completion.

The funny thing is, Bankers are notoriously slow to change technologies. They very much have a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude about technology.

One such business banker who oversaw the project from a business partner perspective just seemed hell bent on killing the project from the get-go, but I was ready for him.

On a friday afternoon, he called a meeting and demanded we stop "wasting money" retiring the DEC VAX. Apparently, the damn' thing was his baby.

My response was very simple and I was ready for him. I'd already worked with our Finance folks to figure out how much money the bank WASTED over the 14 years that the bank kept the DEC VAX running while everyone else had moved off the platform.

The total using net present value of money, was north of $36 million dollars that the bank wasted, which could've been better spent by retiring it when they should've, and modernized other systems and lifecycled out legacy hardware.

I'm still at the bank. That banker/business partner left in 2009.

You can guess who won that battle.

Funny thing is, I'm almost always successful getting what I want done at the bank because I know the fastest way to make change in an expense constrained environment like a bank, is to show how they're wasting money, and calculate the net present value of that money if they do NOTHING.

That strategy has worked flawlessly for me the last 8.5 years I've been at this bank.