Wall Street economist Edward Yardeni has predicted that there is at least a 35% chance that Year 2000 software bugs will cause "a mild global recession" and could result in chaos for many organisations. The much acclaimed "millennium bomb" is associated with software and systems which are dependent upon two digit representations of the year, and which may malfunction when the calendar changes from the year 1999, represented in those software and systems as "99", to the Year 2000, represented as "00". Networking specialist and black empowerment company Choice Technologies - a DNS Group joint venture partner - has launched a year 2000 initiative and has identified a number of key areas which will be affected by the date change. According to business development director, Daphne Mashile-Nkosi, these areas are centred in message handling systems and directory services and post-processing operations such as call charging, customer billing or other records where, in simple terms, the start time and end-time are compared to determine the chargeable duration. According to Mashile-Nkosi, Choice is "aggressively committed" to customer readiness for the Year 2000 and is able to provide tools, training, impact analysis, cost-benefit analysis, project management, source remediation, testing, and mentoring. "In association with DNS and other partners within previously disadvantaged communities Choice is gearing up to provide customer service programmes to assist users to determine the best course of action to make their applications Year 2000 compliant and ensure a smooth transition to the next century," she says. "We recognize that most business enterprises today are comprised of a variety of hardware and software environments. As a result, we are assembling Year 2000 remediation teams that can address a multitude of programming languages and operating systems."
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