Significant savings on licence costs are one of the big attractions
of open source software. It is a benefit SNS Bank, one of the
Netherlands’ five largest retail banks, is realising following its
deployment of open source software vendor Red Hat’s JBoss
application server as a key component in the upgrade of its
front-end transaction and payments processing system, SNS
Administration System (SAS). Highlighting what he termed “drastic”
savings on licences, Marcel Schmidt, SNS Bank’s IT project manager,
said annual savings on the SAS front-end alone amounted to at least
€200,000 ($294,000).

The upgrade of the bank’s SAS was prompted by technical limitations
of its former Pascal-based application (Pascal is a computer
programming language developed in the 1970s). Red Hat’s
applications use Java, a programming language developed by software
vendor Sun Microsystems in the mid-1990s.

With the JBoss application server now in operation, SNS Bank
reports that in addition to savings on licence costs it is enjoying
increased system stability and reliability and a reduction in
hardware demands, compared with its previous system. SAS supports
more than 3,300 workstations that handle about 500,000 transactions
daily and has spare capacity to support at least 2,000 additional
workstations.