TreeWorks Blog

The first 15 Romanian banks, having 89.5% of the market, got an average of 64.73 points for online presence (the maximum being 100).

Who is offering a lot of information, who has RSS Feed, who proposes a fidelity package for the young generation, who has a newsletter, who’s the one with most pages, who has mobile banking, who gives dictionary or tutorials? We arrived at the conclusion that BRD has the best online presence.

The things that propelled some banks up to the first places can be read not only here, but also in the press: Banii Nostri, Bank News and Cotidianul.

I took a look at the previous post and I realized that it can also be read in the hype/firemen-ish code. Behold Grid Computing!

Look at this paragraph from (the famous, but too little read) What is Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly:

Operations must become a core competency. Google’s or Yahoo!’s expertise in product development must be matched by an expertise in daily operations. So fundamental is the shift from software as artifact to software as service that the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis. Google must continuously crawl the web and update its indices, continuously filter out link spam and other attempts to influence its results, continuously and dynamically respond to hundreds of millions of asynchronous user queries, simultaneously matching them with context-appropriate advertisements. It’s no accident that Google’s system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques are perhaps even more closely guarded secrets than their search algorithms. Google’s success at automating these processes is a key part of their cost advantage over competitors.

It’s also no accident that scripting languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, and now Ruby, play such a large role at web 2.0 companies. Perl was famously described by Hassan Schroeder, Sun’s first webmaster, as “the duct tape of the internet.” Dynamic languages (often called scripting languages and looked down on by the software engineers of the era of software artifacts) are the tool of choice for system and network administrators, as well as application developers building dynamic systems that require constant change.

If we admit that the phase of software as an artifact has passed away and its place has been taken by the software as a service, is obviously that on the hardware side more-more flexibility is needed. Practically, this grid computing thing does exactly this: includes the hardware into the application.

We are now working at a project for upgrading some systems in the grid computing paradigm. This paradigm goes really well with the web 2.0 philosophy. For instance, Google got to top at the same time as the wave of computing as commodity. That was the moment when the cost of the usual hardware got to be so low that, by placing them together,it got to replace the supercomputers. And maybe the most important technological advantage of Google is the big capacity of storing/processing plus high availability: that being the Google OS. The ensemble of computers from data centers plus the software that coordinates the leviathan.

On the other side this advantage is kind of passing. We now have grid computing. For which the type of hard you are placing is no longer important. The most known grid service is from Amazon (Elastic), but there are others too. The idea is that every smart little firm or a group of smart kids can now do cool stuff and scale the resources in the mean time with the success. As you probably know the big problem is that of scaling at big numbers of requests/users/processed data. Of course, the problems of grinding big numbers do not completely disappear.

But I should not drag it out: the idea is that in times in which the power of computing will be delivered just like electric power, the innovative idea and its execution are going to count more. You do not have to think at the costs of a hydro power station until you get with the workshop at the dimensions of a big factory and you want to reduce the operation costs.