Cisco Systems Inc, Dell Computer Corp, Motorola Inc, Solectron Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc – along with 22 other companies – formed a new consortium yesterday, aimed at reducing the impact of Year 2000 issues on the high tech industry. The new organization, named the High Tech Consortium, will pool resources and leverage shared information about the Y2K readiness of suppliers that provide critical components to the 27 member companies.
Since many of the member companies share the same suppliers, the HTC aims to collect, monitor and share information on Y2K readiness more efficiently, for general use by members. PricewaterhouseCoopers prepared a study of 3,000 companies that supplied 12 of the HTC members, and found that each member shared between 20% and 50% of its suppliers with other members.
The HTC is the second IT supply chain organization to emerge over the last month. In May, the RosettaNet initiative, which shares many of its members with HTC, revealed the implementation plans for an internet supply chain among IT suppliers, aiming to establish common exchange protocols for business-to-business e-commerce dialogs. Similary, HTC will develop standardized tools and methods to assess, mitigate and plan for potential Y2K disruptions. Fees are $15,000 per member.
Other members include Advanced Micro Devices Inc, Arrow Electronics, Hewlett-Packard Co, LSI Logic Corp, Seagate Technologies Inc, Silicon Graphics Inc and Unisys Corp.
As the organization was being announced, Congress and the White House finished negotiations over legislation designed to control the number of lawsuits that could arise from Y2K issues. John Podesta, White House chief of staff, said he was now ready to recommend that President Clinton sign the legislation, which has been backed by the high-tech industry. The bill gives companies 90 days to fix bugs before lawsuits can be filed, and caps the amount of damages claimable. The White House had been worried that the original bill offered consumers too little protection.
