Re: Y2K

[jmiller@canberra.com]

I would like to support what Sanford Wagner from Ortec said regarding vendor 
responsibility when it comes to Year 2000 compliance issues. Canberra, like 
Ortec, is very concerned about the potential impact of Y2K on our products and 
is committed to bring our customers into 2000 without any disruption in service 
as a result of the problem. Like Ortec, all of our current active products are 
compliant or are being brought into compliance. It is important to understand 
exactly what that entails from our perspective. We have developed a full 
Compliance Verification Program. We have established a standard against which 
we are testing our products and a complete test plan for each product. Our QA 
department is fully testing each product and issuing a certificate of 
compliance once testing is complete. Only after we have performed verification 
testing will we declare a product compliant. It is simply not enough to tell 
our customers that our products are compliant because we believe them to be so. 
We are obligated to fully test all of our products (regardless of our belief 
about their compliance) not only to satisfy our ISO 9001 standards but to 
provide our customers with complete confidence that their Canberra products are 
compliant. We are absorbing the cost (and it is significant) of this testing 
effort because we believe it is the responsible thing to do. Like Ortec, we 
have been in business for many years and have instruments and systems in the 
field that may 20-30 years old. It would not only be impossible for us to test 
all of these obsolete products but it would divert resources away from our 
continuing efforts to bring state of the art technology into the marketplace. 
We have, therefore, developed reasonably priced upgrade paths to assist our 
customers who will need to replace older equipment.