Fwd: China's biggest bank makes switch to Linux

[G.Waleed Kavalec]

FYI

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kiran Khan <kiran_khangr8 at yahoo.com>
Date: Apr 29, 2005 11:34 PM
Subject: [depthsofsea] China's biggest bank makes switch to Linux
To: nust group <nust at yahoogroups.com>


 
 

  

China's biggest bank makes switch to Linux 
Other banks expected to follow suit 
  
SHANGHAI -- China's biggest bank plans to deploy Linux on servers
across its network of 20,000 national branches in a project that may
be the biggest Linux deployment yet seen in China, according to an
executive involved with the deal.

Under the terms of an agreement announced yesterday, the Industrial
and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) plans to gradually roll out
Turbolinux Inc.'s Turbolinux 7 DataServer operating system for all of
its front-end banking operations over a three-year period. Financial
terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

What makes this deal special is its size. With $640 billion in total
assets, ICBC is China's biggest bank, serving 100 million individuals
and 8.1 million corporate accounts at more than 20,000 branch offices
across China. When the project is completed, many of ICBC's 390,000
employees will be accessing applications hosted on Linux servers on a
daily basis.

ICBC chose Linux in part because its existing front-end applications,
which were developed in-house, run on The SCO Group Inc.'s SCO Unix,
and migrating them to Linux was determined to be an easier upgrade
path than switching the applications to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows
operating system, according to Claude Zhou, general manager of
Turbolinux China.

ICBC has been granted a site license, and front-end applications based
on Turbolinux 7 DataServer will be rolled out on a "step-by-step"
basis to all of ICBC's 20,000 offices, Zhou said. ICBC employees will
access the applications from terminals. "This is the biggest Linux
implementation in China," according to Zhou.

ICBC is in the process of choosing a systems integrator to handle the
project. Bank executives are expected to announce their decision soon,
Zhou said. Officials from ICBC weren't available this week to discuss
the project.

ICBC isn't the only one of China's four main banks to have decided to
deploy Linux. For example, Bank of China has deployed Linux
distributions from Turbolinux and Red Hat Inc. in regional projects.

More banks are expected to follow ICBC's lead with large-scale Linux
deployments, according to Zhou. Agricultural Bank of China, another of
the country's top four banks, is expected to announce within the next
month a tender for a Linux site license that is similar to the ICBC
project, he said.

The fourth major bank, China Construction Bank, is also expected to
announce sometime this year plans to move its IT systems to Linux,
according to China's state-run media.

The shift to Linux is driven by the banks' need for better software
performance and better vendor support, said Nielse Jiang, an analyst
at IDC in Beijing. Currently, most of these banks are running their
applications on SCO Unix and they are looking to upgrade their
systems. "In China, SCO Unix offers very weak support for customers;
they have so few employees," he said.

The banks have also opted for Linux because of lower operating costs
and the relative ease of porting their applications from Unix to
Linux, Jiang said. They also pay close attention to what the other
banks are doing. "If one successful case has been implemented, the
other banks will consider doing that," he said.