The NAB discourages the use of proprietary software, claiming using software based on open standards brings down total cost of ownership (TCO). Brett Ellison, head of the eBusiness National Intranet Team for the NAB told ZDNet Australia the bank supported open standards from an architectural principles perspective, but was still trying to leverage existing assets to the greatest degree possible.
"In an ideal world we would use open standards for everything," said Ellison. He considers the biggest technical challenge facing banks today is finding the investment to move away from reliance on legacy proprietary systems.
The dangers of employing non-open standards has become apparent over the last few years as companies, desperate to find a source of income after the tech-wreck, trawled through their libraries of patents in the hope of finding some way to force everyone else to pay for using it. This resulted in lawsuits such as that of Forgent Networks over the JPEG format, and British Telecom over hyperlinks.
While openly stating his case that the TCO equation is more attractive in the open standards area, Ellison is less inclined to detail his position in the area of security. He was unwilling to put his two cents' worth in on the argument whereby proponents of open standards are waging a bitter slanging match against proprietary software vendors over which system offers more security.
"I'm not sure what the standards are, they're evolving as far as I'm aware," said Ellison. "You have to make sure you have good security architects in place and they'll architect a good solution".
NAB is obviously comfortable with the security offered by open standards, as it is currently migrating its Internet banking platform to WebSphere Application Server V 4.0, which runs on the open standards of J2EE. However, Ellison points out that as much as NAB wishes to move to open standards for everything, a lot of software in use is still proprietary.
"My gut would tell me very little is open, because the standards are still evolving, just came in. As we start new projects more and more will come in," he said.
Steve Mills, vice president and group executive, IBM software group, said that NAB's concerns were widespread. "Our customers ask us everyday how they can integrate what they currently own with what they already have".
"The industry has moved irreversibly towards more open standards and interoperability, not less," he said. IBM support for open standards gave Linux a boost when the IT behemoth threw its weight behind the operating system. Mills is quick to point out that there are no lofty ideals in IBMs push for open standards.
"The more open those standards are the faster we can integrate our products," he said. "Our business grows faster and we're more successful as a result of open standards".
"It's 100 percent of what we do-people just don't ask for proprietary".
Let's hope that when NAB talks about open standards they are including desktop office software.
For too long companies have paid inflated prices for MS Office because they are locked into the file formats that Office uses.
Now that StarOffice and OpenOffice.org can easily handle Office file formats, along with their default, open, standards based XML file format, companies have an oppotunity to benefit from a competitive market, instead of finding themselves bound to a single company.
Hopefully, the NAB might consider looking at cheaper, but workable, alternatives to Office. This would allow the NAB to reap the bebefits of open standards, and their investors the benefits of reduced costs for desktop software.