We had a similar debacle back during the dot-com boom. We were a Microsoft shop and we got a new CTO who despised our monoculture and demanded a shootout against Java. A large team of consultants and employees labored for almost 10 months to produce a system that scaled to .. 2 simultaneous users while running on the latest Compaq servers with tons of memory. Meanwhile our legacy VB6 app was serving 1600+ users on mid-tier hardware.