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A very big roll of the dice ...
As HP moves to change the way we think about computers, it might be that ATMs will not change that much after all, but everything behind their façade will be barely recognizable.
June 20, 2014 by Richard Buckle — Founder and CEO, Pyalla Technologies, LLC
I have just returned from Las Vegas where I attended 2014 HP Discover. As events go, Discover is one of the big ones, drawing from multiple communities, all with ties to HP. This year, many of the presentations celebrated HP's 75 anniversary — from its celebrated garage beginnings creating the audio oscillators used by Disney Studios in the making of "Fantasia," to its development of the world's first scientific hand-held calculator and beyond ...
In September 1977, I moved from Edmonton, Alberta, to Dallas; while strolling malls I stopped numerous times to look at HP’s watch with the calculator built in. As I recall, the watchband held a small stylus to help manipulate the tiny keys. The price —$750.00 — was close onto two week’s pay as a programmer.
Little did I know all those years ago that I was looking at the first wearable computer. This historical footnote came up during a keynote presentation by HP CEO, Meg Whitman. With all the attention now given to glasses with inbuilt network access, it’s as though wearable computers were something completely new and faddish, the way some in the IT community are behaving.
When it comes to ATMs, I’m not suggesting for one moment that we will embrace a wearable cash dispensing solution (although our old-fashioned leather wallets fall into this category, I guess), but it continues to surprise me how little ATMs have changed since I first saw them in the 1970s. What’s inside has changed, but when it comes to reading a card, checking a PIN, and dispensing cash (or its equivalent), despite the hype accompanying many recent announcements, not much has changed.
This is possibly due to the clientele ATMs serve — as we do more and more financial processing online, we are less inclined to want to stand at a machine to do intricate and often quite lengthy transactions.
But is this about to change? Is there something bigger on the horizon that’s likely to force us to revisit the whole ATM user experience? There’s no escaping that we are all contributing to the escalating generation of data, and with data comes greater insight, so much so eventually there are bound to be side effects for all who deploy and operate ATMs.
In the past I have written about ATMs that are tied to our mobile devices in such a way that clicking a QR code on an ATM will see money dispensed immediately. No keys tapped and no identification verification — just simple cash dispensing.
Likewise, biometrics are helping to extend the reach of ATMs into developing markets where communities lack the wherewithal to follow even simple protocols. However, all of this is mere window dressing and there’s little chance we will not recognize an ATM when we see one.
On the other hand, the generation of even more data is having an impact on the systems that support modern payment platforms. Knowing intimately not just what a community is doing, but also each individual within that community means that payments platforms can churn data and make assessments of individuals needs, all in real time.
When transactional data is combined with reference and historical data, there’s no limit to what insight can be derived — that is, as long as we provide enough processing power cheaply enough to our payments processors.
In her introduction of HP CTO Martin Fink, during a second keynote presentation, Whitman made the observation that “cloud computing, the Internet of things, mobile networks, [and] machine-to-machine computing” are generating unfathomable and unmanageable amounts of data, and a new computing architecture is necessary to deal with it.
Fink, in turn, noted that, “We've been using the same architecture and been doing it the same way for decades.” Furthermore, he said, when you look at it, 90 percent of what the operating system and processors are doing “is just shuffling data between different storage tiers.”
Yes, a lot more data and a lot more shuffling, and still, the prospect of gaining better insight into what our customers really want from an ATM has us all eager to capture even more data — so much so, that when it comes to the back-end processor, HP is going to roll the dice and develop a whole new computing architecture.
Simply called The Machine (Fink bemoaned the lack of a marketing group within the HP labs) and said it’s “a new compute design built from the ground up. Processors, specialized for a particular task or ‘workload’ connect to a fabric based on light for communication. In turn, all of this is connected to a single large pool of ‘universal memory’ that obviates the need for separate memory and storage tiers.”
It was almost inevitable that what we know as a computer would evolve — it’s a data-driven world and we all recognize the need for an uncompromising data-centric computer. Running networks with more than 100,000 ATMs is not for the faint of heart, but throw into this mix a greater need for better insight into our customers’ every desire and you have the perfect storm destined to sink conventional computer designs.
Perhaps unveiling The Machine in Las Vegas just underscored the risks involved for HP as it moves to change the way we think about computers. It might be that ATMs will not be changing all that much after all, but everything behind an ATM’s façade will be barely recognizable.
It might never be a wearable device, nor is it likely that it will see anything become more important than dispensing cash, but if the thought leaders at HP are correct and they succeed with their plans for a new computer architecture, The Machine will give us the power to deploy ATMs like we have never imagined possible!
About Richard Buckle
Richard Buckle is the founder and CEO of Pyalla Technologies, LLC. He has enjoyed a long association with the Information Technology (IT) industry as a user, vendor, and more recently, as an industry commentator, thought leader, columnist and blogger. Richard participates in the HPE VIP Community where he is part of their influencer team.
