The recently announced Linux Centre of Competence in London is
being set up to help financial institutions and their suppliers
assess, prove and deploy Linux solutions in a business environment.
Here Andy Cash, IBM's European head of Linux for financial
services, gives his views on the benefits of deploying Linux in the
financial services market.
Cost
The financial services sector, like most
industries, is in a period of challenging conditions. With recent
stock market corrections and an ongoing downturn the intense focus
on cost will continue, driving further investigation into
efficiencies in e-business infrastructure and more effective ways
of working. Cost containment and operational resiliency are the
market's primary focus and Linux is becoming a significant platform
option.
Price performance
Linux adoption is accelerating
rapidly in financial institutions, with initial interest driving
proof pilots in areas such as computational finance, in many cases
yielding significant price performance improvements in excess of
100 to one.
Once proven, financial institutions are looking across their
organisations to assess areas for Linux deployment. Internal
applications, third-party software and infrastructure services such
as Web and database services are obvious targets for consolidation
and deployment on Linux.
Security
As an open source offering, Linux is rapidly
evolving through the combined efforts of companies and individuals
and is demonstrably free from security backdoors - a key issue for
financial institutions.
Easy to deploy
As the Linux platform is a derivative
of Unix, many existing Unix tools and applications can be ported
across to Linux with a recompile and a small degree of "fix-up".
Here to stay
Linux will find its place despite its
detractors. IBM is already seeing many financial institutions
formally evaluating Linux as they see evidence of cost savings in
the region of 30%. Many predict that more than 30% of their
workloads will eventually run on Linux. Linux may indeed be the IT
catalyst businesses are looking for to ride the downturn, protect
market share and accelerate rapidly when conditions improve.