We like to joke about the ‘old days’ in the technology industry; the days when buying a software solution meant that you also had to buy the hardware platform for which it was designed. You could certainly say that times have changed for the better with open-source, abstraction, APIs, virtual machines, and interoperability. Unfortunately these modern benefits are only available if your software vendor has embraced them in its design, and most of the solutions providers in the Basel space have not allowed this flexible existence for their customers.

Very recently, one such vendor charged one of its clients USD250k for a ‘best endeavours’ attempt to port its solution from the vendor’s preferred platform to the client’s preferred platform in order to introduce multi-threading. The vendor did not actually have the skills required to port its solution or to make it multi-threaded so the bank volunteered its own resources. They were allowed to look over the vendor’s source code. The good news was that the vendor had not introduced any extensions to its 16 year old source code which would have prohibited the port. The bad news was that the bank’s architects considered that the $1.4m solution was so poorly designed that the work was never completed for a multi-threaded version. No refund was offered by the Basel solutions provider because it insisted that the client could still achieve multi-threading by installing multiple instances of the software...hard to believe, but true.

But…there may just be a solution on the horizon which was designed from scratch in 100% pure Java2 to take advantage of multi-threading, distributed processing using Spring, with the ability to be deployed effortlessly on any hardware, any operating system using Just-In-Time compilers, and any one of the 24 database management systems currently tested against Hibernate, delivered to your browser using OpenLaszlo or client-server delivered using Swing over Soap… Why not talk to us at RegCap?

<--Previous                            Next-->