Blog
Crash and grab. Rip and replace. What's with all the violence?
April 28, 2014 by Richard Buckle — Founder and CEO, Pyalla Technologies, LLC
Skimming the posts and features of the past few days, the headline "Gone in 60 seconds" proved just too tempting to ignore. As someone who likes cars a lot and spends as much time as I do driving them — any reference to a great movie always compels me to check deeper, and in this instance I found Storefront Safety Council co-founder, Rob Reiter.
Is it too strong a response to suggest that by his numbers, Reiter is outlining an epidemic? Are American financial institutions handing over $228 million or so to these cash-starved entrepreneurs (or lowlife wretches as Reiter more accurately described them) and where do the stolen ATMs wind up? In landfills?
If the numbers add up, each year nearly 20,000 ATMs require replacement — and that's just in the U.S. But the phenomenon is not merely confined to the U.S.
Late last year in Victoria, Australia, The Age reported on the trial of A former Victoria Police employee who had planned to ram raid bank ATMs. It came out in his trial that "there was mention of blowing up a police car, knocking out substations and creating diversions."
Step aside Nick and Angelina, there might be an even more impressively pyrotechnic-packed feature coming to a theater near you, courtesy of the land that brought you Mad Max!
My initial reaction was, "Surely, there's a better way than this to address unsupported Windows XP ATMs!"
And what about law enforcement agencies? If data from the Storefront Safety Council is anywhere near accurate (50 U.S. ATM thefts per day), on any given day, there's at least one ATM being chased down for every state.
Much later, I had the thought that this resembled a more traditional rip and replace scenario — perhaps it had nothing to do with Windows XP and more to do with these being very old ATMs still on proprietary B-Loops hooked to IBM 4700 banking controllers, but I quickly put that to rest. Those relics left the scene long ago.
But, might there be any other explanation for crash and grab raids besides pure lowlife greed?
You know, much discussion has taken place of late about hybrids and clouds. Are these violent attacks on ATMs just the work of IT professionals frustrated by all the change. Has their patience just worn thin and rather than to help themselves to cash, they and other radical underground techies determined to slow the march to commoditization and standards?
"I will give you agile," I can almost hear them intone, "chase these ATMs and plug these holes while I rip out the ATM around the corner!"
In all seriousness, it's not the stuff of action-adventure movies, and it isn't stuff any true IT professional would wish on an FI. But change continues to happen and whether or not it's "rip and replace," new solutions are appearing with more modern implementations available from an ever-increasing, diverse mix of vendors. Unlike the cash and grab incidents on the streets, inside the data center, these changes are what is fueling broader acceptance of hybrid computers and even cloud computing. A stretch? Not likely …
"If the customer doesn't want to renew their contract with an existing vendor, because they have become frustrated with the cost and treatment from the old management team," Ki Roth, head of business development for the Americas at Lusis Payments, told me.
I had interviewed Roth for the NonStop community blog, Real Time View. Rip and replace certainly has its place within the data center. And there are those CIOs "who prefer the 'rip and replace' method," Roth said.
But with clusters and hybrids more widely understood today, "We see great value in the method of setting up our new product, Tango, 'in front' of another solution … and very slowly over time as either new products come on board (or as branches area acquired from a competitor), begin to route that traffic to Tango." said VP and GM for the Americas, Brian Miller, "When they are ready to retire the old legacy system they realize that 40 to 60 percent of,"their volume is already running through the Tango solution."
There's sense in doing this, according to Thomas Burg CTO of comForte, whose network security products are shipped as part of the NonStop operating system, is that:
[T]he end result is very cost competitive and very agile," Burg said. "Furthermore, very few parts of the application will have 'platform lock-in.' Whether the hybrid is NonStop in front of IBM Mainframes, Linux in front of NonStop, or even NonStop on x86 fronting NonStop on Itanium or MIPS, there are compelling arguments for this even if you just consider the issue of scaling up."
Connecting the dots between "smash and grab, by wretches" and "rip and replace, by CIOs" may be too far-fetched for some. But is it? Some CIOs today might blush to remember that at one time, even as the stars aligned, they ripped and replaced working systems on a whim with scant appreciation for the havoc to follow.
They did it all in the pursuit of commodity hardware and the melding of best-of-breed software, or worse, in the pursuit of client-server computing. No, from my own observations, there are more CIOs whose actions might categorize them as wretches than we care to admit, with many FIs every bit as much out of pocket as they'd be if their ATMs had been stolen.
Gone in 60 seconds? Who knew — eventually, this might be all the time it takes for old legacy systems to see their transactions siphoned off and the functionality they supported, supported elsewhere with no rips or replacements encountered.
Now there's a plot we all should hope makes good in Hollywood!
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.
