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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.