Linux Journal: Linux and Finance at LinuxWorld Expo; Banks on the Brink of Rolling Out Linux

“Welcome to New York, financial capital of the world. Linux
isn’t here to run some little web server–banks and other financial
institutions are one good proposal and a couple of meetings away
from rolling it out in their data centers. Strangely enough,
they don’t mind saying they’re using Linux for development or
testing, but nobody wants to be the first to say to a customer,
“Your account is on a Linux box.”

“First, development. Open-source development projects have
solved problems of scale, code reuse and quality control that
financial institutions haven’t, so the smart ones are starting to
take a lesson from the hackers. Every big financial institution
basically has a computer company inside. These places have huge IS
budgets and staffs, and have more different machines than even most
Linux Journal readers. Unfortunately, the trend has been to
encapsulate development projects into small groups that share no
code, waste effort and make all communications among separate
in-house kingdoms as difficult as possible. However, Tim Hunt at
Goldman Sachs is rolling out a new system to, he hopes, start to
change that.”

“Speaking of SourceForge-like projects, want a free virtual
Linux box on an IBM mainframe for your development project? The
S/390 gurus at the IBM booth say the lawyers have approved it, and
the offer will be up on IBM’s Linux for S/390 site soon. Each
virtual box will have 20GB of disk, by the way. I ran into a bunch
of financial IT people who haven’t gotten management to sign off on
bringing Intel-architecture servers into the data center with the
Suns, but don’t have any trouble getting a virtual Linux box
running on the mainframe they already own. Looks like IBM will be
selling more services and, eventually, more mainframes.”

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