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A Year 2000 fix?
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July 7, 1998: 11:27 a.m. ET
Small company claims to have an answer, and customers, for Y2K bug
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Amid all the dire warnings about the impending doom associated with the Year 2000 problem, a little-known company in Waltham, Mass., is claiming to have a solution… and some big-name customers for it.
Data Integrity Inc. says its product, called Millennium Solution, can drastically reduce the time necessary to prepare a database for the year 2000 -- a date change that has many computer programmers panicked.
Such heavyweight organizations as Citibank, NationsBank and the Interior Department are using the product, according to the company. The product was cleared for a U.S. patent in June, Data Integrity said.
And technology companies already are lining up at the door to take ownership of the technology.
Millennium Solution, developed by Data Integrity founder Allen Burgess, treats the Year 2000 dilemma as a math problem, whereas other products search for dates.
Because older computer systems, such as those used by banks or government institutions, use only the last two digits of the year, a system wouldn't know if 00 is 1900 instead of 2000. The two-digit method particularly becomes a problem when a computer attempts to figure out a person's age.
In the year 2000, older computer systems could calculate the age of a person born in 1902 as negative 2 instead of 98. Such errors would wreak havoc on personal finance and other important records.
Millennium Solution searches for the math in a software program, then instructs the program to add 50, then add 50 again.
Burgess said other Year 2000 bug fixes rely on requiring programmers to add the extra two digits to each occurrence of the year in a database.
"They use what's called the glossary approach, which requires finding where each instance occurs and replacing it with four digits," he explained. "That means there's human interaction and human intervention, and that means mistakes. The most accurate [solution] I've seen is only 95-percent accurate."
Data Integrity says Millennium Solution's method significantly reduces the time it takes to test a system because it makes fewer changes to a system's code than other products.
Along with its high-profile customers, Millennium Solution also has earned an endorsement from computer industry market research firm Aberdeen Group, which evaluated several Year 2000 tools last month.
Also, as one might have guessed, Burgess has been approached by a number of big-time technology companies looking to strike a deal to buy the Millennium Solution technology.
Burgess declined to name any of the companies, only pointing out that Data Integrity has been involved in several discussions but isn't close to making a deal.
Despite all the positive vibes surrounding Millennium Solution in the last few months, analysts and users of the system are hesitant to say a cure has been discovered.
"My initial reaction was that it's a neat solution, but whether or not it did the job was to be determined," said Tom Oleson, Year 2000 analyst at International Data Corp.
Bob Osmond, an independent consultant hired by Citibank to help solve its Year 2000 problems for its worldwide securities operations, said Millennium Solution's approach is strong but that it's only a piece of the puzzle.
"It helps give programmers an idea of what needs to get fixed and how to fix it," he said. "The strength of this is it frees the programmer from expanding the dates. It satisfies the calculation as if it were four digits."
For some operations, however, Osmond said programmers still need to make corrections manually.
And even with the big-name clients and ringing endorsements, most organizations haven't exactly been beating down Data Integrity's door to try its Year 2000 solution.
"I think the simplicity of [Millennium Solution] scares them," Osmond said. "That and they're not a huge company like IBM." 
-- by staff writer John Frederick Moore
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Data Integrity Inc.
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