Virgin, the sponsor for theLondon Marathon
2010, has created acharity
fund-raising site, based on open source
technology.
Virgin has used open source components, including the
MySQL database,
JBoss application server,
Apache web server,
Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite and
Talend extract, translate and load database tools, to build a
service-oriented architecture to take donations on behalf of UK
charities.
Jeremy Walters, head of systems development at Virgin Money, who
spearheaded the project, has taken the open source route, over
commercial products, in a bid to save costs and increase
flexibility. It is a not-for-profit site, so keeping operating
costs low is paramount, particularly as Virgin Money hopes to
undercut rival donation sites by offering lower commissions on
donations taken through
Virgin Money
Giving.
"When Virgin became the sponsor of the London Marathon until
2015, we were given the option to become the preferred online
fund-raising site. While there are a number of donation sites on
the internet, we wanted to create something that provided a
market-leading service at considerably less cost to charities," he
says.
Open source savings
The company took advice from analyst firm Gartner on the
feasibility of using MySQL and chose open source companies that
offer professional services to support their products.
Walters says, "Open source is not necessarily an easy way to
save money up front. We chose credible companies and bought
professional support." Since open source code is licence-free, the
money saved on licensing has instead been used to pay for external
expertise and support.
The site, which was built by a development team of 20 from
Virgin Money, integrates the open source components with the
company's existing Oracle Financials back-end accounting package
and the card payment service supplied by The Logic Group. Virgin
Money Giving used Opsera, a provider of open source products and
services, to help it build the platform. Opsera worked in
partnership with Virgin Money to analyse and design the website and
application, and led the initial development and delivery using
offshore software development house, Arrk.
Hardware savings
Walters says Virgin Money Giving has not had to buy lots of
additional hardware to support the site. Instead, the servers for
Virgin Money Giving are run on top of VMware, to create logically
separated servers on the same hardware infrastructure as Virgin
Money's existing core business applications. He says the logical
separation of applications on physical servers provided by VMware
means that Virgin Money Giving is able to run the new service
within its existing Cable & Wireless managed datacentre, which
provides full disaster recovery.
Storage is also shared on the an EMC storage area network, but
with full data separation at the application layer. "We have fully
segregated the Virgin Money Giving application from Virgin Money
systems, while benefiting from the economies of scale of the
existing Virgin Money infrastructure " he says.
Valuable experience
Using open source software has not hindered FSA and HMRC
compliance at Virgin Money Giving. In fact, Walters says open
source has helped Virgin Money Giving customise the site. As an
example, he says, "I don't think we could have created a fully
integrated reporting function unless we could access and amend the
code in Jaspersoft."
Walters says the Virgin Money Giving project has given the team
experience of integrating open source systems, working with
offshore development outsourcing and even building a Facebook
application, experience which could be applied on the core Virgin
Money site.
The project began 18 months ago and has an absolute deadline of
October 2009, when runners will be notified if they have got a
place on the London Marathon 2010.