Accenture threatens INQUIRER over New York City story

A TOP SPINNER AT ACCENTURE has decided to threaten the INQUIRER over a story we wrote last week about the NYC 311 site being hit by the Blaster worm early in the morning on "Blackout Day", even though his firm wasn't mentioned in the story at all.

What gives?

This has to be surely a first in online journalism, and we're happy to run the Accenture denial of something that's got nothing to do with it at all. We never said Accenture was anything to do with a Blaster worm crash in the first place, and so were obviously puzzled by a call from the firm last Friday, and so took detailed notes of the conversation.

We stand by our story. And if Accenture decides to break new ground by suing the INQUIRER about a story that's nothing to do with it, we'll be very happy indeed to see it in court.

The Accenture spinner called the INQUIRER last week to deny that NYC 311 had been hit by the Blaster Worm. On the blower, he told us that it was "an impossibility" the Call Centre was hit by Blaster because it was a Solaris only site.

He said then - according to the notes we took at the time - that there were no Windows machines in NYC 311, but as you can read below he now admits there are some servers there. They are just nothing to do with Accenture. He also made allegations on the phone, which we noted down, that "unions" were blocking the citizen help line. This call came only one day after NYC was hit by a power failure, and as you'll note from our original story, it was written well before any power failures hit the North Eastern coast and beyond.

Accenture's denials last Friday that NYC 311 uses Windows NT servers and clients are just not true, because the NYC 311 centre does have a number of Windows NT servers and clients, not operated by Accenture, but by another company. We carefully noted down what the Accenture spokesperson said last week. He absolutely denied the NYC 311 site had suffered downtime and after he called us, we spoke to our sources again, who further explained what the problem was. NYC 311 is not a totally Windows free site, that's absolutely clear.

Accenture says on its web site that it leads a series of subcontractors for 311 including Sun, Genesys, Siebel, Interwoven, IXP, Motorola, Cisco, Nortel, Verizon, Information Methods, Winbourne and Costas, SDG Corp and Oracle.

It is certainly true that the heart of the system runs on Solaris, but the 311 centre certainly has Windows 2000 and XP desktops in place, as you can see from this vacancy for an MIS manager on the NYC web site.

Down at the skyscraper.

See below how the Accenture spinner decided to butt into a story which was nothing to do with it. It's definitely a first in online journalism. After we received an email from him demanding a retraction, we contacted our sources again, and the sources maintained that the Win patches were not in place last Thursday morning when the Blaster hit. We suggested to Accenture that it not involve itself in a story that was nothing to do with it, but it insists. As you can read below. µ

Mike,

While your story does not mention Accenture, it is well known that Accenture is the prime contractor on the NYC 311 system. Take a look at the story from Australia's Commsworld (below). We have been in contact with Commsworld and they are willing to retract their story if you retract your original report.

Your story makes a number of false assertions that require a retraction including:

1) " the New York City call centre was hit by the Blaster worm this morning, causing widespread disruption as tech staff scrabbled to deal with the problem"

False. The 311 system never fell victim to the Blaster worm. There was no "widespread disruption" of 311.

2) "hundreds of client machines in 311 started falling over as well. That led to all the phone lines at the Call Center going to busy as technicians tried to fix the problem."

False. The call center desktops (client machines) were not infected by the Blaster worm. It is a technical impossibility. And even if they had been, the call center phones would not have gone busy. There is no interconnection between the client machines and the inbound call system.

3) "The project integrates 84 small call centres." False. 14 City agencies were consolidated under 311.

4) the call center "uses a large number of NT servers as well as hundreds of NT-based clients."

False. The call center utilizes just 4 NT servers (representing less than 10% of all the servers deployed) in the back-office operations that I described to you on the phone. These four servers are used for reporting, are not mission critical, can not stop inbound phone traffic and would not bring down service if they failed. Neither the NT servers nor the clients failed at any point, or were effected (sic) in any way by the Blaster worm.

These are the facts. The Blaster worm did not penetrate the 311 call center. The call center is not a Microsoft NT environment and does not utilize NT client machines. The call center operates in a Sun Solaris environment and 311 customer service representatives handle calls using Siebel CRM software.

The xxxx system you mentioned in your e-mail today is part of a back office reporting system, and has nothing to do with the system's ability to handle incoming calls. These backend reports are generated to track system volume, do pattern analysis and so forth.

However, the xxx and back office systems did not fail either. It is up and running today [the 19th of August 2003[ and has been running without incident since the system was launched. Xxxx certified the patch released by Microsoft on July 16 and last Thurs the four NT servers and related desktops were patched -- without incident.

Finally, as you may have seen, within a half hour after the blackout began, Mayor Bloomberg urged citizens to call 311 to get local outage information. The (sic) handled a record volume of calls without any disruption in service -- more than 100,000 inbound calls during the first 24 hour period following the blackout.

These undisputable (sic) facts contradict what your sources are telling you. But our facts can be verified. Unfortunately allowing these sources to make accusations that can be verified as false, is damaging Accenture's reputation as a leading systems integration company and the leading 311 implementer.

We need you to take immediate action to correct these inaccuracies before additional media outlets like Commsworld perpetuate this false story further.