This sounds amazingly familiar. My present client has an interesting twist to the saga.

They have a project to rewrite all their so called "legacy" applications in a new platform of Java + J2EE + Oracle. The project was kicked off over 2 years ago, and has just been severely downsized after going €multi-million over budget without delivering anything. This has resulted in redundancies to some of their permanent staff.

My role here is "Applications Support", looking after one of these "legacy" C++ apps. So far, I've been reporting to production management, and involved in "stabilisation" - monitoring scripts that digest log files, written in, guess what, perl :).

The PHBs are looking to integrate apps support with development, and I look on this with a certain amount of trepidation.