Netherlands-based SNS Bank has realised cost savings of at least EUR200,000 by migrating its transaction processing applications to an open source platform.
The bank has deployed its transaction and payments processing system - SNS Administration System (SAS) - on a JBoss Application Server supplied by open source outfit Red Hat. SAS provides services to over 3300 workstations that produce over 500,000 transactions on a daily basis at bank branches across the Netherlands.
By moving to Application Server SNS Bank has benefited from reduced licence costs, increased stability and reliability and a reduction in hardware demands, compared with its Pascal-based system, says Red Hat.
The bank is now able to run the entire system on eight IBM X-series servers, with enough spare capacity to support over 2000 additional workstations.
"By choosing an open source environment based on JBoss, we managed to save at least EUR200,000 at the SAS front-end alone," says Marcel Schmidt, IT project manager at SNS Bank. "On top, we now run seven additional Java-based applications on JBoss."
SNS is now looking to deploy a full service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment and plans to use JBoss jBPM, Red Hat's workflow framework for business process management, to extend the benefits of open source and Java.
The flexibility and scalability of the Java environment allow SNS IT to add more PCs to the current IT infrastructure without the need for any additional budget, says Red Hat.