Tech World, Linux and open source software pay off for PayPal:
When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company’s data centre surprised him. “Wait a minute,” he recalls saying, “they run a payment system on Linux?”
“I was pretty familiar with payment systems and global trading systems, but I just scratched my head when I came here,” Thompson says. With his history of working on IBM mainframes and large Sun Solaris systems, the PayPal approach to computing seemed alien, especially for a company whose core mission was dealing with money. (...) Thompson says he quickly saw the economic, operational and development advantages of open source and Linux technology. He now sees no other way to do it."When you’re buying lots of big iron, as I did in other places I’ve worked, your upgrade path is $2 million, $3 million at a clip. You just had to buy big chunks of stuff to scale," he says. “Here at PayPal, our upgrade path is 10 $1,000 no-name servers, slapped into the mid-tier of the platform. And we just keep scaling it that way. It’s unbelievably cost-effective.”
Via Eric Newcomer, Open Source for Business - Really. Eric makes economic considerations; it is the financial computing world, after all: :)
The industry has seen hardware go thorugh a commoditization cycle, in which the cheapest solutions are constructed of the best standard parts from various sources. Competition at the component level — CPU, disk, display, etc. — helped drive down prices. Now we are beginning to see the commoditization of enterprise software, with Linux probably the big break through. Again, in the spirit of competition, it has helped drive down prices. And as the TPC has known for years, it’s not only how many transactions you can process that’s important, it’s also the cost per transaction.
I will probably use this example to help me make the case of cultural shock, development processes and cost structure as being an important driving force in talk I’m giving about the ecosystem of free software during the Open Movilforum Day next week. Nothing more conservative, in terms of infrastructure, than payment systems. No better example than the one that shakes conceptual foundations. I wanted to use Clay Shirky’s lovely business models too, to show that the place (locus) stays while the teams, hardware and software change.
"You will be pleased with me today, diddy beats mother," said Dick to his mother, coming home from school. "Monster beats studio
I saved on fares. In ear headpones review
I didn’t go to school by bus, monster beats turbine pro
I ran all the way after it." beats limited edition headphones
“Well,” said his mother laughing, "Next time you should run after a taxi, you will save much more Sleek Headphones
erformance-black-45.html">Monster beats</a>