Linux Lands Big Bank Account

An anonymous reader writes "The European arm of Banco do Brasil, the largest bank in South America, is switching from Windows to Linux to cut costs and centralise support. The long-term strategy is to phase out Windows completely. Linux is also being used to replace Windows on desktops. Vnunet has the whole story."

Comments

riiight...

[Anonymous Coward]

more likely they just want a fat discount from Microsoft...

Sounds a bit unlikely

[moderators_are_w*nke]

Banks have a reputation for being extremely conservative and set in their ways when it somes to changing software, and I'm surprised that a bank would make such a wholesale switch like this, especially to a platform no other bank has really used before. Still, good luck to them, it will be interesting to see who successfull the project will be. Not wanting to start another debate on Linux on the desktop, I won't mention that the plan to throw away all the Windows desktops and replace them with Linux sounds a little over ambitious, not least because of the cost of retraining staff. Mark

Re:Sounds a bit unlikely

[WanderingGhost]

Banks have a reputation for being extremely conservative and set in their ways when it somes to changing software,

Indeed. But I knew those billions IBM invested in Linux would make a difference someday. :-)

and I'm surprised that a bank would make such a wholesale switch like this, especially to a platform no other bank has really used before. Still, good luck to them, it will be interesting to see who successfull the project will be.

That bank is controlled by the Brazilian government. It's a very important bank in Brazil, so I believe they have a big probability of success.

IIRC, they are running Linux on one (or more?) IBM mainframe (now, that explains it!). Their portal has been rewritten in JSP.

BTW, some other Brazilian banks are starting to be more Linux-friendly (although not using Linux themselves). Banco Itau', for example, now has a front page in their netbanking site with an "indexLinux.htm", to which you are redirected if you are using Linux. And yes, it works perfectly with any Mozilla-based browser! (No Java VM needed)

Bogus, particularly with high unemployment

[Ars-Fartsica]

Simple economics - employees are far more amenable to changes in their work environment when unemplyment is high. This is exactly the time to make such a change.

Need for diverse windows versions.

[Flamesplash]

I agree. I really think MS needs to offer radically different versions of Windows. I don't need/want the majority of stuff windows comes with. I'd really like a stripped down windows and just add things as I want. Where my grandmother may want all the flashy stuff to be there.

It would be really need to see some stats on the frequency apps that come preinstalled are actually used. I'm talking about every single .exe not just the stuff in the Add/Remove Control Panel.

Re:Need for diverse windows versions.

[shaitand]

Most linux distro's actually come with about 4 times as many various little games as windows. Granted, OSS still needs to figure out how to use more sensible names for these games and elsewhere. I remember the first time I saw the name gimp, I thought WTH is that... now I'm the type I opened it up and found out. Most aren't, change the name to GNU Image Editor, now I see GNU Image Editor, hey I know what that is, it's safe to open an Image Editor and play with my pictures. The same applies to pretty much all Gnu software.

ING Bank

[loucura!]

I have a friend who works for ING Bank, and apparently they are putting together a group to test the feasibility of Linux for their day-to-day. He's complaining because they chose people he considers inferiour, and is trying to get in the project...

Kinda amusing, considering he's a card-holding MSCE.

Re:Not Based on Merit, Just a Reorg.

[bmacy]

Windows is hands-off? I have several years experience at an MSP and I can tell you that your experience with Windows being more hands off is very irregular. We had customers that all we did for them was reboot nodes in their Windows Server farms a dozen times a day when certain monitors failed.

Anyways, almost without exception it was Windows servers that would be the boxes with perpetual problems.

Hardware costs or Support costs

[hillct]

This seems to be a long term play, since they're spenging huge amounts of money on extremely high end IBM hardware (server side), so logic dictates they;re in it for the long haul since the only way to realize the indicated cost recovery, is to retain this new platform choice for at least 10 years.This is great to see.

Also, several folks have mentioned their concerns regarding trusting open source software with their money. I presume custom banking software will be ported, from it's original platform, so open source vs. closed source is meaningless where the software is all custom developed anyway. Systems with specific definable requirements such as will be used here is significantly easier to secure than systems where hundreds various and sundry services are allowed to continue running. Microsoft won the antitrust suit so we can't expect to see a stripped down truly secure Microsoft OS any time toon. All in all, this seems like wise strategic move.

--CTH

Re:Hardware costs or Support costs

[Greyfox]

I haven't seen any performance numbers, but one of the things they teach you in CS is that the perception of speed can sometimes be more important than actual speed. One of the examples that I recall was that waiting to refresh the terminal until you've gotten all the text from the mainframe can seem faster than updating it and scrolling as the text comes in. It may actually be slower but the user will think it's faster because of how the data is presented.

What does this have to do with JVM performance on Linux? Well X handles frames radically different than Windows does. Since the application is not handling its window controls, you can minimize or close the application even if it's completely frozen. For this reason, X GUI apps have always seemed faster to me than Windows ones, because I retain control over the GUI even when one app is bogging the system down.

Microsoft oddly never seems to learn from these fundamental design flaws. They've tried to work around the problem rather than simply solving it (I see these theme a lot in the IT Industry these days; see my recent posts on security.) Likewise, storing system time in GMT and using timezone offsets is how God intended time to be kept on computers. To this day Microsoft seems to feel that it's OK for their OS to adjust the system clock for daylight savings time rather than just doing the sensible thing. It seems to me that since they're bent on world dominance, they should at least have their product evolve out of such silly problems. Ah, but I digress a bit...

Re:Not Based on Merit, Just a Reorg.

[platypus]

I'm admining 5 linux servers and one nt server. The nt server is definately more work to keep it running.

About installation, as soon as you have to install a serious server application, linux wins hands down in many cases. This is because installing something like sql-server+iis on microsoft needs a lot of patching and disabling stuff. Go to MS's website and search for installation procedures for something like siteserver, there are a lot of steps involved.
This get's worse if the os ages more and more, but you want to install a newer application, because you first have to update the os with a lot of stuff before the application is even able to run.
Contrast that to the typical linux distribution, which, while additionally being a lot cheaper, enables you to install a updated OS together with a matching version of the app, both configured&compiled to work together.
I'm quite sure I'd install a production ready system with a sql server and a webserver with SuSE (or Redhat etc.) in less than half the time than a competent windows admin a system with the same functionality (more or less) an windows based system.

Hold on there

[Bouncings]

Reading the article, a quote jumped out at me:

In the future, he said, the bank hoped staff would converge to a single skill-set.

Ok, I generally like the sound of companies jumping ship to Linux, but we've heard the "converge to a single skill-set" dozens of times in the past few decades, and seldom with favorable results.

If I may bitch. You don't want a single skillset. You've got a C++/Linux project? Good! Hire half C++/Linux developers, half a mixture TCL/Linux, Perl/BSD, Visual Basic/Windows. You don't want a single skillset. Why? Generally the VB/Windows head will think a certain way. If you actually achieve your fantasy of a single skillset, you've lost the diversity of thought that comes with a staff from multiple backgrounds. People with different skills think of things different ways and can contribute great ideas.

Now if he said, converge on a single goal -- that would be far more encourage and far less pointie haired.

Sorry to harsh the buzz.

I wonder...

[Tal Cohen]

When will Microsoft start publishing (fake?) "user success stories" of switching from Linux to Windows?

web apps

[Anonymous Coward]

I went the other day to my bank to ask for some stuff, and all the information that I requested was queried/retrived/printed via a some sort of web browser. The bank has some sort of terminals where you sit with a member of the staff and you can see them typing and using the computer. The browser, rather than have the "explorer" logo or mozilla or whatever, it had the logo of the bank....the computer run win NT. I remember as well going to the bank to get some money out from the cash point. That day they have changed the ATM's interfaces from the old text based ones to fancy graphical ones.
Out of 6 ATM's 3 had the nice "graphics" running, 2 had "please press ctrl+alt+delete to log it" and the last one had a "green" screen of death, as the the screen was totally brigh green due to color of the screen. It was the last day I saw fancy "graphics" on the ATM's, I wonder why...

MSs Place in the Market

[Flamesplash]

I really wish I could remember where I read this, but I read somewhere that one of MSs problems is that they are trying to expand into a market that they really aren't suited for.

They went on to place solaris, linux, and windows into their appropriate market locations

MSs was vastly on the desktop, while holding a modest position in the small server market.

Linux took up the rest of the small server market and had a small chunk of the Large end server market.

Solaris/mainframe systems had the rest of the large end servers.

To the author MS was trying to take hold of more of the small end server market that it could an also trying to wedge itself into the large end server market, all while maintaining the hold on desktop systems. Linux was also trying to take too large a hold of the desktop market instead of just staying with small end servers and the random techno geek.

I really agree with the authors assesment, really wish I could remember who it was. All I know is that he is rather promenent in the tech industry.

Re:MSs Place in the Market

[Anonymous Coward]

" You see but linux is not a company, it's not "Trying" to go anywhere,"

Your analysis is flawed. You see, open source software is made by developers. These developers have a vision for open source. they are "trying" to acheive that vision. It may not be monolithic, as in a corporation, but they are "trying to go someplace".

Re:MSs Place in the Market

[alias]

You're right, Linux is not a company. Linux is a product that other companies like Redhat and IBM are trying to push into the Enterprise server space as well as the desktop space.

To the people here on slashdot Linux is just something that "gets adopted," because we have free time to play around with new technologies. However, when IBM / Redhat go talk to companies who are trying to decide on a platform to base their business on, such as this bank, it very much is a product that their respective marketting departments are trying to "push" into this space, just the same way Microsoft is trying to sell Windows in this space.

See Redhat's Enterprise Solutions page.

Linux running Java faster

[i_luv_linux]

If this news is really true it is very good news, but I couldn't understand what the guy mean by "Linux runs Java much quicker than Windows". The speed of Java heavily depends on the compiler and runtime technology being used. As far as I know Microsoft Java was one of the fastest JVMs out there. ORP was comparing its own performance with MS's JVM and for many programs it was behind.

Java and lInux will kill the MS beast

[Anonymous Coward]

It is nice to see that people are seeing the viablity of Java and Linux. We ported our Java app to Linux and saving ton of money , downtime and dev time.

Our apps runs better in linux than windoze our dev pc boxes are redhat 8.0 too.

Customer like it that they can have Linux servers that cost nothing as it can run on old hardware running our server side java app

Thanks Linux

Re:Hope

[Anonymous Coward]

For now, I've heard of encrypted keyboard, mouse, audio, video, and harddisk - more than enough to kill any competitor.

Reverse engineering won't help. Access paths are likely to use encryption of some form, making it a crime to reverse engineer in a large number of countries. And since 'circumventing a protection mechanism' is now also a crime that makes using Linux a crime in the near future.

People, wake up! We are in deep trouble!

Re:The world is coming to an end!

[hrdrck]

Just shows how much you know about running Linux as a desktop. I am betting that you have NEVER run Linux as a desktop and used it for a significant period of time. I am a lone Linux user in a Windows environment and I function just fine and I don't have to reboot my machine 20 times a day. The people I work with don't even realize that I use OpenOffice and send them documents that they open it Micro$oft Office without any trouble. I think this bank's move was gutsy and will be more and more prevalent in the business world in the next few years.

Obviously it's not faked

[cyba]

Their uptime says all.

Bill do you hear that sucking sound.

[ClubLeader]

With the current economy and Microsoft's licensing costs this should become an on-going event. One business after another switching from windows to Linux. Maybe then Windows will lose its hold on the market and we will all benefit as a result.

I can't wait!

likely..

[turingsfool]

I'd say likely. Read this excerpt from a report in an Indian Mag: For instance, says a Linux distributor speaking off the record, his company had recently concluded a deal with a large public sector company to implement Linux across the organisation. This was done after the company rejected a Rs. 9-crore (approx USD 1.875 million) Micro$oft proposal to upgrade its system. Even as the ink on the deal was drying. Micro$oft staged a counter attack by offering to implement the infrastructure for just Rs. 2 crore ( USD .4 million). "And we lost out on what could have been the best lighthouse projects for Linux in the country" Hence, I suspect Micro$oft's ulterior motive behind its philanthropic father donating "I'm not sure how much" for AIDs in India. Ironically, two huge condoms greated Gates on his visit to Hyderabad. I wish they were worn on larger than life middle fingers, with the rest of the fist clenched!!

Re:I'm shorting MS stock.

[isorox]

Nobody every got fired for choosing Microsoft.

Think about it, most people now have a number one priority of keeping their job. Yes you could risk the open source route, and save your company millions. All it takes is one little bug and *you* get the blame. "He's the one that chose linux". Windows can crash all it wants, people accept that as the way computers work. Although decent IS managers know that in a normal desktop, linux, kde and mozilla are much more stable then windows and IE, their bosses wont. Anything that goes wrong with windows, you say "It's microsft, they're crap, just reboot/reinstall". If it goes wrong with linux, expect a lot of questions.

Re:I'm shorting MS stock.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Nobody every got fired for choosing Microsoft.

Not true.

At the company where I work, the previous sysadmin was fired because he wouldn't stop using ActiveX in the company website.

In California, a vice-president of a bank was apparently fired due to his decision to use Windows NT in the bank's ATMs. The Windows-based ATMs kept locking up with BSODs (there were pictures of a BSOD'd ATM on the Internet).

And everyone lost their jobs when the company that bought out my former employer went bankrupt. The buyer was trying to reduce costs in anticipation of an IPO, and, despite our warnings, they insisted on replacing our "expensive" Unix servers with Windows NT servers. As a result, our formally-loyal customers started leaving in droves. The problem was that our customers were stock brokers, who required 100% uptime, and the new NT servers couldn't match the near-perfect record of the Unix servers they replaced (similar to the experience that Microsoft had with Hotmail).

So don't tell me that nobody ever gets fired for choosing Microsoft. It happens every day.

And it's going to happen even more often as business leaders learn about the benefits of Linux. Employers are going to realize that when they hire an MCSE, they are hiring someone who has been trained to put Microsoft's interests ahead of what may be best for their own company.

Re:retraining

[stryc9]

HUH???

In this case, and in a lot of cases really, there really is no retraining involved. As stated in previous posts, this bank, like many other organizations, has staff that need only a couple of applications to perform their funtions. These can be ported to *nix and nobody needs to be the wiser.

I would love to switch our desktops at the company I work for to Linux. Most of the employees currently use db applications that have a SQL backend and an ERP/sales orders/work orders/inventory system. The databases could easily be hosted using mySQL and easy web-based apps could be created and users could run mozilla. Also, all our users need email. This is just as easy in Windows as it is Linux.

The main reason for me loving this so much is that there would be no more users with stock-tickers in the corner of their screens, no more instant messaging or p2p file-sharing apps, no more useless games and applications downloaded, no more damn SETI@home screensavers, no more virii, no more worrying about the outlook preview pane, ... and the list goes on.

Sure the new apps may be a little different, sure you may need a little retraining for your users, but they will only know what they need to know.

I really fail to see a bad side here...