Year 2000
Year 2000 without Tears for Bull's Customers

A couple of weeks after the moment of truth, Bull is happy to report that no major Year 2000 problems have occurred with their systems. The considerable efforts that we made in advance, working with our customers, partners and suppliers, have allowed us all to sail through the "fateful" date without significant problems.

Groupe Bull's global Year 2000 Program, covering more than 75 countries, made a major contribution to this, in anticipating possible trouble.

During the crucial transition phase, the major operational mechanisms, laid on to answer "customer alerts" on Bull hardware and software, successfully dealt with every reported incident.

If any further proof were needed of the preparedness and mobilization of our customers' IT services, it is significant that the number of calls was not any higher than for an equivalent 'normal' period.

As with our customers, the internal systems of all Bull units have remained fully operational throughout.

The Eiffel Tower on New Year 's Eve.

While remaining vigilant for possible delayed-action Year 2000 issues, we have now returned to normal every-day customer support levels for all our operations.

Our regular day-to-day customer support services provide daily assistance on three poles of activity:

• "system" services for GCOS, UNIX and NT environments;
• infrastructure services for networks based on LAN/WAN architectures;
• "desktop" services.

With Bull's 4 international remote support centers and over 200 national call centers throughout Europe and elsewhere, our customer service teams number more than 4,000 engineers world-wide handling an average of 5,000 calls a day.