I've written before on PayPal's reliance on open source, but came across this article that takes it one step farther. Not content to admit to deriving benefits from open source, PayPal's Matthew Mengerink (VP, Core Technologies, PayPal) lists four things that any IT department can do to derive maximum benefit from open source:
PayPal transacts more than US$1,500 every second of every day, with millions of people around the world relying on the robustness of its system.
It comes as a surprise to many people that PayPal runs such a large financial services company on an open source platform, but that's precisely how we're able to deal with the two competing demands our business model places on us: security and innovation.
... Read more
The old way was to spend a lot of money on limited software and hardware. The new way, as PayPal's CTO (Scott Thompson) of three years found, is to scale out with lots of low-cost hardware and software. Open source enables this, and to marvelously good effect, as Thompson describes:
PayPal runs thousands of Linux-based, single-rack-unit servers, which host the company's Web-presentation layer, middleware and user interface. Thompson says he quickly saw the economic, operational and development advantages of open source and [Red Hat Enterprise] Linux technology. He now sees no other way to do it.
... Read more
- prev
- 1
- next
