The Bloor Perspective: Limited Wingspan, open source mobiles and Houston floods

Wingspan was an entrepreneurial internet banking start-up, launched in 1999 and soundly backed by Bank One - a large US bank holding company. It was an internet-only bank and the marketing slogan was: "If a bank could start over, this is what it would be."

What it would actually be is unsuccessful. What is happening is that it is being absorbed into Bank One. In reality Wingspan didn't do much wrong, it outsourced most of its activity. The website was hosted by IBM and a series of partnerships offered a broad product portfolio.

But Wingspan didn't attract customers. By June 2000 it had only attracted 95,000, which compared unfavourably with Bank One's 600,000 online users. By November 2000 it was obvious that some Wingspan customers were having difficulties using the banking service.
Online transactions were okay, but it was harder to make deposits and withdrawals.

So in September 2000 Wingspan announced a programme whereby its customers could open accounts at Bank One branches and use ATMs for depositing money. By May 2001 CEO Jim Stewart had been replaced and he left to embark on a new banking venture, Juniper Financial.

We can easily contrast this with UK internet banking. The simple difference is UK successes have all involved a loss-leading offer to get customers to come, with the intention of making them stick with innovative service. Historically, people switch spouses more frequently than they switch banks.

In the case of Egg and First-e it was simply a matter of paying high interest rates on current accounts - high enough to attract money. Nevertheless, the investment required per new customer was high (estimated by some as above £250 per account) and it will be a few years before that investment is recouped. If the customers stick, it will be worth it.

It is clear Wingspan never had that kind of money to play with, couldn't get customers in large numbers and went into decline quickly. Its absorption back into Bank One is a phased withdrawal and an admission of defeat, accompanied as you might expect, with promises to leverage the invaluable experience gained. One wonders if they ever looked at what was happening with internet banking in the UK.

ECos systems

Red Hat has just announced a partnership with 3G Lab to create a new operating system for cell phones and other mobile devices, but, surprisingly, Linux is nowhere to be seen. Instead, Red Hat's eCos operating system will form the base of the new platform.

ECos (the embedded Configurable operating system) is an open source real-time operating system originally designed for deeply embedded applications. It operates on devices with footprints even smaller than the minimum configuration required by stripped down Linux platforms. ECos provides a basic runtime infrastructure to support devices with memory footprints in the 10s to 100s of kilobytes or with real-time requirements. ECos has been created to work in very small systems that don't have the sort of computing power that Linux devices demand. As might be expected, eCos does support EL/IX Level I, a Linux compatibility interface.

With such a solid platform from which to develop, Red Hat and 3G Lab are well positioned to develop a serious platform for the new mobile space. Up until this point in time, eCos had already been ported to eight CPU architectures.

It will be interesting to watch the development of this Linux cousin in the mobile arena. Currently there are two major factions in the mobile device market backing two different platforms.

Symbian's EPOC platform is supported by many of the major handset manufacturers while in the opposing camp stands Microsoft's Stinger, with only minor handset manufacturers Mitsubishi, Sagem and Sendo in support.

We may be preparing for another challenge from the open source community to the commercial big boys. Will open source developers leap onto this platform as readily as they have to Linux? We shall wait and see.

Red Hat, of all of the current Linux suppliers, has one of the most comprehensive support systems in place and this may help the new operating system take off.

The IT ark

The floods in Houston, Texas were scarcely reported over here, but there were some good BCP (Business Continuity Planning) lessons from them that should certainly be noted for future reference.

The first lesson, as ever, is that it's never too early to plan. In a long report, Information Security magazine stated Pentasafe Security Technologies were finally ready to implement their BCP plan, which had been delayed by other priorities, when Mother Nature dumped three feet of water on Houston in a single month.

Of course Pentasafe's employees all rallied round, as far as possible. Cue lesson number two - assuming you've avoided the elementary error of omitting to have available all employees' contact details, allow for the fact they might not be able to get to you. It turned out that 24 employees had their cars destroyed and Houston is not known for its public transport system, even if flooded roads had allowed access. If your current BCP plans rely on frequent meetings, it's a point worth noting.

Lesson number three - think torches. Any mention of those in your BCP plans? And, when thinking relocation, how you are going to manage that without power and with roads flooded? This is one situation in which mainframes are definitely bad news and pizza boxes and other rackable servers come into their own.

The power situation in itself holds lessons (Lesson number four). If you did any science at school, you may already know that water seeks its own level, even over a very extended area. So having your main power supply input and auxiliary generators on the same level - even when separated by considerable distance - is definitely not a good idea.

One option is to allow for work to be continued from home. That saved a key and urgent Pentasafe project but there is no clue in the report as to how the security of source code under development and shipped to workers homes was handled. Best not to have too many disaffected employees if you are contemplating this.

Pentasafe survived successfully and was back to at least the appearance of normal operations after five days. Along the way, making their website a priority and keeping it updated on the prevailing situation, as well as having everyone available spend hours making and answering phone calls, helped keep customers informed.

It's an unseasonal time here to focus on these lessons but doing so - come winter - could prove time well spent.

Bloor Research