IT vendors milk clients, says bank CIO

First National Bank (FNB) CIO Yatin Narsai is struggling to do business with sales-led, commission-biased IT supply organisations. "They need to transform to value creators," he says.

Too many place sales ahead of service and bulldoze clients into unsuitable solutions, Narsai warns, adding that their business models place an unhealthy reliance on milking customers.

"The heavyweight vendors need to transform. Some of their licensing agreements are akin to an annual tax, with us getting very little in return," he adds. "They are creating artificial business cases for us to go elsewhere."

That somewhere else is open source. "We have a lot of interest in that area and a very good track record," Narsai says. Linux is used in many of FNB's business units. Initially, it was a matter of cost saving "but that is only a small benefit now, others are greater".

"The quality of the products surprised us," says Narsai. "They are strong and robust." Part of the reason is that they are better and more rigorously tested than proprietary products.

"Generally, the product is only regarded as mature enough for release if a year has passed without a bug report. No [proprietary] IT company can afford to have a product in beta state for that long."

There are other reasons FNB now prefers open source solutions, "but I'm reluctant to share them as they provide competitive advantage", says Narsai. He did relent to say that what amazed him at first was the level of support the open community provided.

"When benchmarked to mainstream suppliers, they are better. Within hours of encountering a problem, you can speak to the developer of that component. That is the ultimate in [service support]. It makes sense why Mark Shuttleworth is driving open source so hard," Narsai concludes.