Blog
Everyone is right; everything is wrong!
April 10, 2014 by Richard Buckle — Founder and CEO, Pyalla Technologies, LLC
A quick scan of blog posts and feature stories of late would have even the most optimistic of us start wondering if indeed the glass is half empty. I can't recall having seen the breadth of change this dramatic in years. Not a single piece of technology in the payments market is being left intact. And for good reason: There's just too much money involved.
For some time now I have wanted to find the right opportunity to quote lines from a favorite song of mine, from the '70s, featuring lyrics by Donovan, a lyricist often compared to Bob Dylan. Whereas Dylan wrote the popular anthem, "The Times They Are A-changin'" it was Donovan who came up with the line, "Everyone is right. Everything is wrong. Don't let the changes get you down, man!" Perhaps too dark for some in IT, but is everyone right and is everything wrong?
I was taken by a blog post by Mark Smith who said, "This year will be remembered for the number of ATM upgrades and replacements that occurred as a result of the migration from Windows XP to Windows 7. But this is not the only upgrade being implemented at this time."
A feature commentary by Daryl Cornell said that today, "[Our] priority is to tackle Windows XP ATM upgrades before moving to EMV upgrades on CE machines."
Changes to the software in our ATMs; changes in how we pursue security; choices we make when it comes to networking, monitoring and where we store intelligence: The changes are coming thick and fast. Perhaps the pundits are right that our heavy investment over the past couple of decades is wrong — or at the very least, vulnerable — and what was once viewed as invincible needs replacing.
This can just as readily be said about the payments platforms that the biggest banks have relied upon for years — behind our ATM networks lies some pretty incredible software that, if not yet legacy, then for the most part is showing its age. Are we all confident that what we have will remain viable even as everything else changes?
This was at the heart of a recent conversation I had with Lusis Payments Inc. — a new entrant into the American marketplace. Their payments platform, Tango, has been displacing older solutions in Europe and Africa but has only recently come to America.
Already those close to the company report success among some of the biggest FIs in this hemisphere. "The interest coming from the big banks is from those who have made large investments in the HP Nonstop platform and want to keep those platforms in play," said Ki Roth, head of business development for the Americas, when I raised the topic. "Tango is proving of interest to those banks that are looking to migrate away from the legacy applications to something more modern and flexible."
Tango joins a growing list of options for major banks — indeed, even for FIs perhaps not quite as big as the majors. With so many entrants in the payments platform space today, we have begun to see pricing for payments on NonStop become more attractive than any time in the past.
"Regional and local banks are every bit as important for us as we work to get our brand established in the marketplace," Roth added. "Tier two and potentially tier three FIs have as great a need to improve their service offering to their customers as the big FIs, and like these bigger banks, are looking to improve their operating costs over that being incurred from continuing reliance on legacy systems."
HP increasingly is turning to Intel for help in driving down the cost of running NonStop systems and their plans for NonStop to support the Intel x86 architecture will see even greater hardware price erosion. Add in the support for industry-standard InfiniBand as a replacement for proprietary ServerNet fabrics of old, and the price difference between NonStop and some of the more elaborate clustering solutions on offer begins to evaporate — and this isn't being lost on Lusis.
"We've had a tremendous response from the NonStop community here in the Americas," Roth said. "And the fact that in such a short time, we have two customers in production, running on HP NonStop with another two in project mode confirms that we do have a modern application that works very well and can easily replace the legacy systems still in widespread use today."
Perhaps priorities are rightly focused on migrating ATMs away from the XP operating system, even as plans to move to EMV are solidifying for many. Then again, this is becoming a case of "Don't let the changes get you down, man!"
Enough already — and let's not forget that there's an even more pressing need to move away from legacy payments solutions as platforms continue to modernize. Pricing for these solutions has climbed to the point where it's not providing fair value any longer. I have always been a fan of NonStop and readers will not have missed my support of HP NonStop systems through the years. It simply works, out of the box.
What I haven't always been a fan of are the legacy applications that so many FIs have kept running despite a richer choice of payments solutions now on offer.
So no, don't let the changes get you down, as there are many, many, more to come. But everything might not be wrong, and in looking at the options, more of us will be a lot more right than we are being given credit for. Perhaps it's not time for us to sing old songs as much as it's time for us to go Tango!
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.
