Optus' quest to achieve 2000-compliance is being undermined by at least one vendor's refusal to cooperate in its assessment and remediation program, the company's IT director, Chris Gabriel said this week.
And while both Gabriel and his Telstra counterpart, Negba Weiss-Dolev, director of the year 2000 date change program, claim the millennium agendas in place at their respective companies are on schedule, neither expects to have achieved full compliance and be ready for complete testing by the end of 1998.
"It would be wrong of me to say that everything will be done by the end of the year," Gabriel told an Australian Telecommunications User Group NSW special interest briefing earlier this week. "But our next target is to at least be substantially compliant by the end of 1998."
Telstra faces an even bigger headache, with its internal assessment still to be completed. Weiss-Dolev said the telecommunications giant is only 75 per cent of the way through its IT applications, and customer sites are yet to be evaluated.
A longer version of this article will appear in ComputerWorld dated May 1.