Barclays bank has managed to cut its IT expenses by 90 percent after moving infrastructure into a purpose-built cloud, claims The Sunday Times.
Another measure that helped the bank cut costs was the adoption of Linux OS.
According to the newspaper, COO for retail and business banking Shaygan Kheradpir is rolling out the new system, which shuns traditional vendors in favour of open source solutions, across various departments of the bank, and he expects to save Barclays billions.
According to paper, Barclays saved 90 percent of its IT budget by avoiding products from Microsoft, Google, Oracle and SAP. The non-traditional infrastructure has also helped the bank cut down mobile app development time dramatically, and release its PingIt mobile service in seven months instead of two years.
“In modern browser based web development, the use of Windows on your server, for example, is pretty redundant, yet many companies still pay substantial royalties to Microsoft for the privilege. Then there are the SQL and Oracle database costs.
“This move to purpose built cloud ditches MS and Oracle operating systems, and I believe this is where Barclay’s saves its money. This money can then be re-purposed for application development.”
Barclays has often led the way in technology adoption among the high street banks. It was the first to introduce ‘contactless’ (NFC) debit cards, and late last year it told TechWeekEurope it plans to give a number of its branch staff iPads in an effort to improve customer experience and reduce waiting times.
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This is exactly what cloud should be known as! Not rip of software and services from the big vendors!
Great to see them doing what I recommended to them back in 2011 at a security dinner :-)
what a nonsense story!!
totally inadequate and only a small part of the story.
cutting 90% of the IT budget!!!, which IT budget is this? only HW and SW expenses I suppose. Because 80 % of the total IT budget is for the the salaries, and very independently!! of open source or MS!! the IT engineer is costing the same amount of money. So this story with this info is only good for the dustbin
Hmm... maybe I should move my money to Barclays
The more companies adopting Linux the better
Do they know iPads actually don't run open source software ? ;-)
Great to see influence makers choosing open source. Definitely the wave of the future.
This article fails to specify which part of the IT budget they are achieving such astounding savings on. If they ditched Microsoft and Oracle - yes they could be saving the claimed 90% of the IT licencing costs. However, 90% savings of the overall IT budget is completely unrealistic. Of course, unless they completely sold or outsourced their IT function so the savings are just an accounting game.
On the other hand, the article's main point is completely accurate. From first hand I can tell you that Oracle's main function is sales and marketing.
It might have been smarter to bring in some open source and use the threat of a 100% conversion to bring down any outrageous pricing and avoid doing conversion! Sometimes all or nothing thinking doesn't lead to optimal outcomes...
The challenge with cloud-mobility is that it's easy to be so busy marveling at the shiny new technology that the weakness of consumer grade security underpinning it can be missed, especially when wrapped up in TLA (three letter acronym) mobility marketing packages that obscure that fact.
There's a reason credit cards are chip and pin, why would any other part of the banking business be less secure?