out, it’s so sensitive.” She shook her head. “It’s a major coup for Avogadro. We’re talking about a billion dollar revenue opportunity. We can’t put that at risk.” Linda looked to Tim for confirmation.
“That’s true Linda. These are highly sensitive customers. An outage right now would almost certainly cause us to lose the contracts,” Tim added, in support. “These customers have service level agreements that guarantee a minimum level of uptime. To have an outage right now would create doubt about our ability to meet the service level agreement.”
“Now wait a minute.” Linda snapped her fingers. “The rolling maintenance windows. Why don’t you just do that? Bring down some of the servers, in small groups, and gradually fix them?”
“We wish we could,” Mike jumped in, “but we’re afraid that the existing systems would reinfect the new systems as they come up. We will need to bring every email server down simultaneously.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to say no.” She waggled one pointed finger at them. “Now, if you had come to me, and you had some very specific, hard evidence that the email servers were causing problems for our customers, I might be influenced to make the decision to rebuild those servers. But that’s not what you have. You have a very strange story about a handful of emails being manipulated. It seems to me that it would be far more likely that your particular email accounts have been compromised, than that the entire email system is flawed. I think you need to talk to Security.” She shook her head sadly again.
“This isn’t a Security problem,” David said. “This is—”
“Look,” Linda said. “I can’t make a business decision that will almost certainly cause the loss of billions based on a few mangled emails. I’m sorry. You are free to talk to Gary when he gets back, of course.” She tapped her manicured nails on the table. “Anything else?” she said dismissively.
Chapter 11
PORTLAND, Oregon — January 6th, 2010 UTC — Avogadro Inc. today announced it is providing a secure, hosted version of Avogadro Applications with AvoMail for Governments.
The demand for secure, hosted Avogadro Applications with AvoMail came from various country level governments who were spending excessive amounts on IT services, while receiving inferior products and services, said Linda Fletcher, Marketing Manager for Avogadro’s Communication Products Division. Avogadro Secure Applications with AvoMail will reduce IT spending by governments by up to 80%, while providing feature-rich, easy to use communication applications, according to Fletcher.
The hosted platform is being adopted immediately by Germany, Canada, and Taiwan, with other countries to follow.
For more information, please visit AvogadroCorp.com
“Holy shit, did you see this press release?” Mike ran back from the bathroom with his AvoOS smartphone in hand. “We, I mean, Avogadro, that is, I think, ELOPe has…”
“Slow down Mike. What is it?” David asked, holding his hands up. It was two days after the conversation with Linda Fletcher, and David, Mike, and Gene were chaffing in a holding pattern, ineffectually waiting for Gary Mitchell to return from a vacation, from which they suspected he should have returned a week earlier.
“Jeez, Avogadro just put out a press release that we have the first
“I think so,” said David with dread. “ELOPe has just expanded its sphere of influence. Now every government official who sends or receives an email via AvoMail will have it filtered, altered, or impersonated by it.”
“This service must be what Linda Fletcher was talking about in the meeting the other day when she rejected our proposal to bring the servers down. She must have known this was in the works.”
“I wonder who really initiated this secure applications platform,” David said, half to himself. “Could it have been Avogadro employees, or was it ELOPe? It certainly is convenient for ELOPe.”
The day after the Avogadro press release of the secure cloud services for governmental organizations, David, Mike and Gene met up again. At Mike’s urging, they met at Extracto coffee in Northeast Portland.
“Why here?” David asked when he arrived. Mike and Gene were already sitting at a table nursing their coffee.
“Best coffee in Portland, bar none. Perhaps best coffee on the entire West Coast,” Mike answered.
Gene nodded his assent.
“See, Gene hasn’t even had it before, and he’s already convinced,” Mike went on. “Get the Flores Island coffee. It’s the one on the left.”
David looked over at the counter, and there were two insulated coffee dispensers next to the chromed bulk of the industrial espresso machine. Walking over, he read the labels. The dispenser on the left was labeled “Flores Island” and contained descriptive text so flowery that David thought he was reading a wine review. “Subtle hints of carmel, chocolate, and cannabis?” David read out loud. “For real?” he called out doubtfully to Mike.
Mike just nodded and smiled.
So David got a cup. Out of the corner of his eye he couldn’t help but notice the disapproving stares from the other two as he loaded up his coffee with sugar and milk. He sighed.
On the way back to the table he noticed a large bag at Mike’s feet. “What’s in the bag?” he asked.
“Ten pounds of the Flores Island beans. It’s only harvested and roasted once a year, and once it’s gone, it’s gone,” Mike explained.
David sat down. “Did you make us meet here just for the coffee? We’re eight miles from the campus!”
“We’re only two miles from your house, and yes, we came here just for the coffee. You won’t have another experience like it.”
“We need to focus on ELOPe,” David said in frustration.
“Okay, okay,” Mike said, as he and Gene chuckled in amusement.
They got down to business.
“You guys remember Pete Wong, the engineer from Internal IT who wrote the email-to-web bridge?” Mike saw nods. “Well, I heard back from Pete.” Mike paused. “I have bad news, more bad news, and worse news.”
“Well, give us the bad news first,” David said with resignation.
“Pete started scanning computer systems at Avogadro looking for the digital fingerprint of ELOPe, as we had asked him to.” Mike paused for a sip of coffee. “He found it on every server he looked at in the Communication Products server pool, even ones it shouldn’t have been on.”
David groaned, and then asked, “And the more bad news?”
“Pete also looked for the digital fingerprint of his email-to-web bridge on the same servers. It was also present on every server. Pete guessed that the email-to-web code had been incorporated directly into ELOPe.”
“How is that possible?” Gene asked.
“The contractors,” Mike and David answered simultaneously, looking at each other.
Mike went on, “The contractors that were hired over the holidays made changes, and we don’t know what those changes were. At first we thought they were just performance improvements, but now it seems that ELOPe changed its own functionality as well.”
They all mused over that for a few minutes.
“What’s the worse news?” David asked, remembering how Mike had started the conversation.
“I went to Pete’s office yesterday afternoon to get an update from him, since we didn’t want to use email or the phone. I gave him my home address in case he had anything urgent for me. Then last night he showed up at my
