On Barclays moving IT back in-house

Traditional vendors must beware of attacks on their B2B legacy, notes Tristan Rogers

Barclays' decision to move to Linux is the real news in the story about the bank deciding to move some IT back in-house. This is a better reflection of what Barclays is actually doing with its technology development, rather than representing a simple move "away" from any vendor, such as Microsoft.

Microsoft and Oracle have long made money from arcane charging models for sales of their operating systems. In modern browser-based web development, the use of Windows on your server, for example, is pretty redundant, yet many companies still pay substantial royalties to Microsoft for the privilege. Then there are the SQL and Oracle database costs.

Private clouds, such as the one that Barclays runs, are more accurately described as a combination of purchased and leased servers hosted in multiple, load-balanced locations, providing a high-availability web-based interface for various applications that have been purpose-built for the user base.

Again, this is a far cry from what happened when there was Citrix or VPN access to an office-based machine. Many enterprises have run such a system and continue to do so.

So this move to purpose-built cloud enables Barclays to at least in part ditch its Microsoft and Oracle operating systems, and this is where Barclays will save its money.

These funds can then be repurposed for application development.

However, mostly we would be talking about B2C applications such as Pingit. The platform for internal working within the extended enterprise remains largely untouched. Here, there will still be many Microsoft licences, for apps including Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL, Office and various other "additions", all employed in the interests of internal productivity.

These apps create vast quantities of digital content, which are typically then sprayed across the organisation via thousands of Windows-enabled servers and shared drives in myriad folders and archives.

While it is great to hear a large enterprise such as Barclays taking a more intelligent route towards B2C application development, there is clearly an iceberg here to be addressed when it comes to legacy B2B enterprise productivity apps from the likes of Microsoft and Oracle.

Only when we start reading about large enterprises using cloud for B2B productivity will the software establishment really have anything to worry about.

Tristan Rogers is chief executive of ConcretePlatform