The Technology industry has prided itself on the fact that for the last two decades it has attracted and graduated some of the most enlightened minds in the world and because of this, the size and complexity of Technology based projects are able to grow exponentially each year. Three millennial leaps have been made by the industry collectively over this period:

‘Object Oriented’,‘Scalability’, and ‘Extensibility’.

Unfortunately, in order to benefit from any advancement, let alone the three largest advancements, software vendors will occasionally need to re-design and re-write any product which pre-dates the advancement. This must be part of what all of your Maintenance Fee covers, right? The best known case in the world involves the largest software house in the world which, while still very profitable, regularly suffers public humiliation because it has never completely re-written its flagship Windows operating system since it was first released in 1985. Now to anyone who has ever used this operating system, this may seem a very obvious poor decision on the part of the company owner, but this is what can happen if

1) an individual possesses this much power and
2) considers that his own priorities outweigh those of his customers’.

Equally reckless is the example from inside the Basel world, where for 30 years one man has privately controlled one of the largest software houses in the world. (revenues of USD1.9 billion per annum) So has he re-invested his customers’ money in keeping his products up to date? Since 1976 his products have been written in a privately owned programming language. They source their data from a privately owned Database Management System. Neither of these are ever likely to be taught at any university in the world. Does this mean that resources to support his products are extremely scarce, becoming more scarce each year, extremely expensive, and could not be considered top industry practitioners? Does this mean that amendments which would be considered quick, safe, and simple in a modern software paradigm might have disastrous consequences if this vendor were forced to ‘patch’ or even upgrade its software? The reality is actually far worse than this. The vendor has recently told customers of its Basel II software that some requirements for compliance simply ‘cannot be met’. The multi-million dollar software simply cannot be changed, and the clients have been left to fend for themselves.

But…there may just be a solution on the horizon which, before its first sale, re-factored its entire architecture, not once, but twice. Why? Because it was not only in the customers’ best, long term interest, but, not too surprisingly, in the creator’s best long term interest. We believe that Basel will be with us for a very, very long time, and we have invested our time and skills wisely to build the best foundation possible to support our customers quickly and easily during the current Basel, and all future Basels … Why not talk to us at RegCap?