Sanwa Bank

Challenge: Creating solutions to the year 2000 problem in an environment that includes more than 350 vendors who provide 90 percent of the bank's programming applications. Application: A four-phase, $20 million project that involves hiring 55 new programmers, integrating vendor solutions and extensive simulated "Y2K" tests of the de-bugged applications. Quotable: "Many banks pick a particular strategy and then do that for all their own systems," Socha says. "Here we can't choose a strategy, we're driven by the vendor(s)." -Socha.