I actually did the exact opposite but I hedged my bets. Accenture was awarded a 40 million dollar by Marriott. At the time I was a fairly powerful executive at Marriott that was in charge of the web middle-ware and infrastructure technologies. They delivered a plan and it was pretty much we are going to build this whole thing on JSP, Struts and WebSphere. I wrote a manifesto to the board about how doing so was setting us back years in development as the world has moved on from these technologies to front end, and back end web technologies.

So I remember they had a program manager from the middle east and he tried every underhanded trick to undermine my credibility. So I buffered myself by hiring a small crew of IBM's Solutions Services and borrowing the top UI designer from Apple on a consultancy basis, these guys are not global services but rather very high end DE's from IBM such as Roland Barcia and Mathew Perrins. Anyways we built a point by point rebuttal against all of Accentures proposals and how we could not achieve our goals using old page-post model that they where proposing.

So anyways, Accenture is arguing that JS based front end technologies are not mature, rest is not proven, etc, etc.

Anyways so we are in the board, meeting with the CTO, CIO and CFO from Marriott as well as my direct line president who is totally on my side. And this program manager starts going on and on about this (it was basically them covering for the fact that they had nothing but sub par Java talent in their org.). So while he is going on and on, I start walking around the table and start dropping packets in front of all my execs. Then I start dropping them in front of the Accenture top brass finally the program manager. The packet contained a Gartner research article from Accenture's CTO about how enterprises that fail to adopt disconnected JS and mobile UI's based on components communicating with legacy enterprise systems via rest ran the risk of becoming outdated and increase technical debt.

Anyway, program manager lost his shit, and came over the table at me. Accenture was escorted out the door, I was asked to provide a budget and a resource plan for implementing it in house. I went to my program manager, and two of my contracting outfits about scaling resource and we came up with a conservative figure of around 7 million, and a 1 year time-frame. We finished in 8 months, at 4.5 million total spend.

TLDR - I saved Marriott 35 million dollars by getting rid of Accenture, did it in house, was attacked by an Accenture personnel and was asked to consider the interim CTO position due to the overwhelming success. I resigned 2 months after the project was finished and went back to remote development, I have never considered a executive or CTO position again after that and other experiences as a CTO with other orgs.

This mirrors my own experience from within accenture about a decade ago. There were serious professionalism issues, not to mention the pm nightmare shoved on devs.

So what backend did you standardize on?

Java rest services. At the time we had heavy investment in Java talent and there was no reason to retrain a large group of in-house developers when they already had to learn a host of new technologies to adapt to the changing landscape of the web UI and mobile.

Aaah, great justice porn!

Thank you. Great story.

Great story, thanks