More work for ATOS ?

[DaveNewcastle]

The ever-expanding French software giant, Atos s.a., seems to have won most of the UK railway's revenue software contracts already.

It took over the maintenance and development of Avantix Mobile, WebTIS ("allows you to sell UK rail tickets, including seasons, alongside added value products and services such as hotels and car hire. WebTIS gives you complete control of your internet retailing, quickly change prices, discounts and how & what products are sold."), LENNON, Crew and Stock Information and Management systems, Avantix Freedom for mobile ticketing and introduced its own retail operation RedSpottedHanky ("it ensures you get the cheapest train fare.").

Here's their boast about their rail systems, headed 'Delivering High Quality and Commercial Management Information'

The Solution
From a testing perspective the salient elements of the solution were:

- Verification and validation of over 17 million lines of code
- Testing for 15 terabytes of disk storage
- Load and performance testing of the systems 28 X 900 mega-hertz of processing capacity
- 40 gigabytes of memory
- Rigorous testing against existing system using 2 pilots

The Benefits
- 24-hour settlement information compared to 6 weeks using the existing system
- Sign-off from all 27 Train Operating Companies
- Daily access to daily sales and earnings information
- The system went live now handles £20 million of ticket sales daily, equating to more than £3.5 billion annually

What a busy bunch of coders they must be (though much of their actual coding appears to be done in Asia).

Anyway, I wanted to have a peek at their Media Releases to see if there was any hint of their rumoured pat on the back for being such a good supplier: perhaps the Department of Transport had chosen Atos to award the Contract for the development of a smart ticketing system for the UK, as advertised to potential bidders before Christmas? Here's what I found when visiting Press Releases on their website at atos.net/en-us/Newsroom/

Server Error in '/aoPublic' Application.
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Exception of type System.OutOfMemoryException was thrown.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type System.OutOfMemoryException was thrown.

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:

[OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type System.OutOfMemoryException was thrown.]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.2407; ASP.NET Version:1.1.4322.2407

Out of memory,eh?
Perhaps they're all too busy trying to find bugs in all that code they are already responsible for?

 

[exile]

I know some people who work there - they used to work for British Rail!

 

[gordonthemoron]

ditto