Time to adopt open source technologies in Banks
Hello Friends,
Following information I found while surfing on internet and I am sharing this may be useful to other members who are interested in open source and Finance field.
"We are seeing more secure and robust solutions being developed within the open source arena than from closed private software development environments."
Devarajan Ramaswamy, Senior Consultant, Capco
Traditionally banks and other financial institutions have been averse to adopting open source technology based projects for satisfying their requirement needs. Though there has been a shift in thinking in recent times, there are no major real life examples to cite. The main reason for this is the perception among banks that proprietary software provides increased security and support while open source systems are yet to be time tested. While this argument was true in its content during the early days, it is no longer the case now. On the contrary, these days we are seeing more secure and robust solutions being developed within the open source arena than from closed private software development environments.
Why do banks feel nervous in going the open source way? Banks are conservative in adopting technology and they tend to be followers than leaders. The idea that OSS/FS (Open Source System/Free Software) is not yet ripe for mission critical application is a myth. Tests conducted by IBM say that free software based operating system GNU/Linux kernel and the core components are the most highly reliable with very efficient memory management and high performance. OpenSSH is undoubtedly the leader in Internet security protocol. These clearly say that the more open the source is the better is its reliability, efficiency, performance, and security. Added to these, users of open source have fundamental control and flexibility advantages, since they can modify and maintain the software to their liking.
Coming to the support aspect of it, it is not that proprietary software is fundamentally better supported. It is important to note that proprietary vendors often drop support for their products over time. The cost associated with this vendor churn can be quite large. OSS/FS programs are automatically in escrow - that is, if their original developer stops supporting the product, any person or group can step forward to support it instead. This has been repeatedly demonstrated. There is no real recourse for proprietary products users, while there are recourses for OSS/FS users where there are many organizations that provide traditional support for a small fee. Multiple sources of support can be better than being tied to one vendor, especially when that vendor provides bad support or refuses to continue supporting software of a certain vintage.
Today, we have more powerful software solutions available in open source combination, such as Perl/Linux. Perl arguably has the largest repertoire of libraries available in the form of CPAN. It has evolved from a mere scripting language a few years back to a full fledged object oriented programming language. Built in Perl for Perl is Open Interact, an application server equivalent; SPOPS gives the framework based persistence feature. You get all these without paying a penny as license fee, though one has to be aware of the requirements when it comes to repackaging for selling. With its superiority in handling regular expressions, pattern matching, and string manipulations, augmented by wealth of CPAN modules and armed with state of art Open Interact and SPOPS technology, one can clearly say that the bang for the buck lies with Perl and other open source based technologies. An attractive LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, Perl) combination, except to say that is extremely attractive.
To conclude, its high time banks and other financial institutions realized that total cost of ownership of open software is much less and started to take advantage of this when working on their technology budgets
Source :
http://www.ciol.com/content/search/showarticle.asp?arid=85981&way=search
Regards,
Nikhil Kale
