Software and hardware manufacturers under pressure to make current and older product lines Year 2000-compliant, are increasingly resorting to vendor will not test notices, according to a new report from Pittsburgh-based researchers Infoliant Inc. The company’s latest Compliance Tracker report, which catalogs information from over 500 manufacturers on 30,000 hardware and software products, shows that nearly 600 changes in Y2K compliance were reported in March, but that over one third of those were negative changes, shifting from compliant status to those of Not Compliant, Action Required, Pending Evaluation or Vendor Will Not Test.
The highest rate of status change is occurring among networking products, followed by application software packages. Wall Data Inc made 25 status changes, Cisco Systems Inc, 52, and Computer Associates more than 100 changes. The report authors claim that the level of status changes still occurring among major manufacturers is not an indictment of their efforts – rather it offers a barometer of just how great the challenge is that the industry faces and how much work remains to be done, even among those companies with the greatest resources.
