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Is there ever a time when I don't need cash?
In IT today, there's really no reason to contemplate deploying consumer-facing solutions that don't deliver 24/7/forever.
January 12, 2015 by Richard Buckle — Founder and CEO, Pyalla Technologies, LLC
There's little argument to be made these days against the prevailing wisdom that we all need to get used to living in an always-on world. In eons past, it took forever for news from distant lands to reach us; today, there's almost no place left on the planet that doesn't know about the latest antics of Mylie Cyrus or Justin Bieber, or isn't alarmed by the news of ferries burning and planes crashing.
Even if I am out to sea enjoying an idyllic cruise aboard some ginormous vessel, I can pull out my laptop, log onto the ship's Wi-Fi network and tap into everything of interest to me.
As for money — accessing my cash anywhere in the world is almost a universal right and I am surprised there's no U.N. mission established to safeguard this right. After all, it's my cash and I need it now!
In the 1980s, I was astounded to learn from a Japanese client that, in Japan, the ATM networks closed down periodically; as I recall, ATMs were out of service for many hours on Sunday. This outage was a reflection of technology in a day when mainframes drove the networks and maintenance (of files, programs and even hardware) called for these mainframes to be shut down for extended periods of time. But that was the 1980s, and so much has changed.
The essentially batch architecture of the mainframe proved to be a lightning rod for the real-time architecture of Tandem Computers. My own switch in allegiance from IBM to Tandem came about because of the recognizable value a NonStop system provided. Some 40 years later, a large majority of ATMs are supported directly by NonStop systems, and they are always on. The fact that today there are a dozen or so payments processing solutions available for NonStop is testament to our preference to be able to access our cash always.
The article "ATMs lose their charm in Chile," said that the nation's banks have "recommended that the public withdraw cash before 4 p.m., as it is often the case that machines are found empty by 6 p.m. Banks are making no promises to refill ATMs in the evenings nor during the night."
Not surprisingly, "The latest move in this row has seen the Superintendencia de Bancos e Instituciones, the bank regulator, threatening to introduce a requirement for 95 percent 'uptime' for all ATMs."
Shocked and slack-jawed at the very least! Stunned, more like it: 95 percent uptime. That's still an awful lot of downtime, and an SLA that would be acceptable almost nowhere.
Why can't we all push for 100 percent uptime these days — or at the very least, 99.9999? By my rough calculation, 95 percent is still a day-and-a-half of downtime per month. And, given that it's likely to be unplanned, it's almost certainly at just the time I'll need cash.
Readers of my blog posts know I am big on getting the fundamentals right, so the choice of platform and solution will always be my starting point — particularly when discussions turn to uptime. Setting goals as low as 95 percent is tantamount to giving up, as far as I am concerned.
I asked OmniPayments CEO, Yash Kapadia, about payments implementations in countries such as Chile, and whether payments solutions running on NonStop systems were commonplace there. Yash said that the price of NonStop systems remains an issue in many countries. Then the exchange with Yash took an interesting turn:
"OmniPayments is working with some of the banks and retailers to address this availability issue with the OmniPayments Cloud service that runs on HP NonStop infrastructure," Yash said. "The OmniPayments Cloud offering gives high availability payment switching at a fraction of the traditional costs."
For many financial institutions, the prospect of deploying clouds — either in a hybrid configuration with traditional data center systems or simply as a managed service — is still a distant possibility. And yet, vendors are already hard at work looking at ways to use their fundamentals to help reduce costs.
"I know we surprise prospects with what we have developed, and yet, this is just a logical extension of what we have been doing for many years," Yash said. "A cloud based on NonStop? 'Why not?' is all I can add."
I know there's a whole raft of factors responsible for the ATM outages in Chile — some even deliberate, it would appear. As the article mentioned, "banks are unwilling to assume the increasing cost of attacks, hacks and vandalism, and are suggesting that the general public should make greater use of the growing point-of-sale withdrawal facilities." However, in IT today there's really no reason to contemplate deploying consumer-facing solutions that don't deliver 24/7/forever.
I need my cash and I need it now. If you exhibit indifference to my needs, I am shopping my business around. Clouds might bring with them their own baggage, but if vendors are already providing products using the cloud and doing so for less money, why would any FI ever dream that 95 percent uptime will cut it?
Hackers, crooks and generally bad guys are a poor excuse for giving us all a hard time. Get over it and get us our cash!
photo courtesy jr | flickr
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.
