GSIS vs. IBM Philippines
The Government Service Insurance Systems (GSIS) and IBM Philippines have filed cases against each other over “defective” software.
GSIS sued IBM and its partner, Questronix Corp., for breach of contract after they have purportedly provided the nation’s pension fund with a faulty software that incapacitated its operations. GSIS is filing for P100 million pesos damage claims in its 19-page complaint filed at the Pasay Regional Trial Court.
According to Estrella Elamparo, the chief legal counsel of GSIS, the government agency has suffered an estimated 5 billion pesos worth of damages, given the man-hours lost and the expanse of resources that was used for the activities done to recover data when its Integrated Loans, Membership, Acquired Assets and Accounts Management System (ILMAAAMS) crashed. Due to the halted transactions, GSIS failed to accomplish significant income from its investments.
On the other hand, IBM slapped GSIS with a 200-million pesos libel suit complaint, due to the latter’s series of unjustifiable attacks.
IBM released a statement that it cannot just stand by and permit its company’s reputation to be disgraced by openly incorrect and deceptive accusations made by GSIS. It has commenced its legal action to eagerly defend its reputation. It added that it prefers to work constructively with its clients and business partners to address any or all issues they may have. Unfortunately, the deliberate derogatory actions by GSIS leave IBM with no other course of action.
The argument between the two started due to the frequent collapse of GSIS’ ILMAAMS, that uses IBM’s DB2 database software.
GSIS stated that the periodic crashes have been catastrophic because multi-million transactions were dependent on the system.
But IBM declared that it has no enforced obligation to GSIS because it is merely an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to Questronix, the leader of the whole ILMAAMS project and who is also the systems integrator. IBM said that it has provided Questronix the DB2 software and the latter customized the software before distributing them to clients.
IBM also added that it did not take part in the supply, installation and support of GSIS’ system and blamed the government agency for failing to abide by the industry norms and best practices in handling its data. Furthermore, IBM said that with the thousands of clients worldwide using the DB2 software, GSIS is the only one to report these types of issues.
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13 Responses to “ GSIS vs. IBM Philippines ”
You have given a good high level background on the issue, allow me to add some technical details as I understand them as of today (July 24, 2009.) GSIS claimed that the application crashes were found by IBM Toronto Lab to be caused by an “overflow†condition when the table space exceeds the limit of 2 TB. This limit of 2 TB for a table space in one partition for DB2 Version 9.1, (which is the one used by GSIS,) is documented in IBM manuals for this version of DB2. Proper performance monitoring of the application should have alerted GSIS that they were approaching the 2 TB limit. However, this was not caught by GSIS and this led to the “overflow†error. DB2 should have caught this “overflow†condition and issued a WARNING message, followed by a graceful shutdown of the application instead of allowing the application to crash. IBM has sent a DB2 special build to remedy this error which was installed on the GSIS system as of May 26, 2009. Questronix claims that this “overflow†error is no longer occurring after May 26, 2009.
Can IBM be sued for this error being caused by DB2 prior to the fix? The answer is NO because it is very clearly documented in all IBM software contracts that it does NOT guarantee that the software is free of bugs. If GSIS obtained their DB2 directly from IBM and had a Maintenance Agreement with them, IBM will try to fix any program errors to the best of their ability, and if they are not able to do so, this gives the customer the opportunity to try to get their money back. Only for what they paid for DB2, IBM contracts have a Disclaimer that they cannot be sued for any consequential or any other damages.
Bert Peronilla, PhD Computer Science
Yup this is correct Bert and I agree 100%. Smart and big corporation like IBM are prepared with this type of problem with their disclaimer and no guarantee clause on their contract.
If small time web designer or even hosting company has clause like this what more with this giants.
The best thing that GSIS can do is to somehow ruin the reputation of IBM but that’s not gonna happen overnight, if other IBM loyal customer using DB2 has no problem.
Oh by the way Bert, thanks for sharing the info about 2TB limit, I’m not aware on this until I read your post.
Justin, we the public now find ourselves in a dilemma as to who and what to believe. Questronix has claimed publicly that the DB2 issue has been fixed as of May 26, 2009 by installing an IBM DB2 special build. Yet GSIS continues to claim that they are still waiting for the DB2 fix.
I have sent several emails to official channels at GSIS requesting a verification of the above conflicting claims. To date, I have not received any reply from GSIS. Does silence mean guilty until proven innocent?
If they only knew that there was a limit and putted a monitoring agent that would trigger a warning for a certain threshold of the database capacity, the problem might have had been avoided.
i think they missed the basic fundamentals of capacity planning and monitoring maintenance.
I somewhat support and believe IBM on this issue. GSIS has released several ads on television pinning down IBM for the cause of all these trouble to GSIS clients. For Filipinos unfamiliar with what really happened, GSIS seemed innocent. For the educated, however, they looked stupid.
Whether it was the fault of IBM or not, I believe GSIS should not have released such ads to sort of “wash their hands” and avoid public criticism. It shows how unprofessional they are to admit their failure to anticipate problems like this and immediately respond to it before a big crash happens. Also, it leaves me an impression of how incompetent the proponents of this GSIS project are.
You’re right Martin as always been the way government runs this country. But truly, everything evolves, this serves a lessons to all.
I believe this is a delaying tactic of GSIS. This is just my opinion, the head of GSIS plundered the money in GSIS and since the disbursements cannot catch up with the deposits, in otherwords there is greater outflow of cash than inflow, they are trying to delay, trick or discourage the public and the pensioners that they are having trouble with their computer systems. There must be transparency and accountability in this matter. The head of GSIS (Mr. Garcia) must be investigated, if he is found to be negligent, incompetent or the cause of this situation, then he must be held liable and punish with the full force of the law.
I believe in IBM side that the fault is not in them but to the db administrator – who made fault to the system. He must be the one to accuse! IBM go! GSIS is aiming you down with their unjustly reasons.
With all due respect I do believe in your opinions guys. IBM should not be held responsible for the issue, IBM is one of the giant companies around the globe and as a respective company they are aware of the limitations of every products they have been made. Like if you propose something such as softwares specially databases of course you should know these things. I do really think that GSIS is using this tactic to delay their transactions.
by the way thanks for the information guys. I do need these informations for my subject Computer Ethics.
I wonder what happened to this issue right now. I haven’t heard anything about the matter for quite sometime now.
I am also wondering how the 2010 elections is going to be like. Imagine the government reopening the registration for first time votes. It makes me think they’re cooking up something. I wish my doubts were wrong.
I agree with mr. jims , i also strongly believe that this is GSIS’s way of covering up for all those billions of pesos plundered by top officials in the agency as well as in the Govt. of mrs. arroyo….where do you think Mr. Garcia’s basic salary of P880,000 a month comes from? and mind you its only the basic salary….how much more for the allowances and additional perks….OMG!!!
I read somewhere that GSIS already migrated from IBM AIX-DB2 to the HP Superdome-Oracle platform. All is working well now. Looks like IBM was really the culprit.
i believe that i know to blame its………
the one who did not read the manual
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